The editors are: Fiona McCrae, director of Graywolf Press; Sarah Gorham, co-founder and editor-in-chief at Sarabande Books, Inc., Sam Hamill, founder and senior editor at Copper Canyon Press; Thom Ward, editor and development director of BOA Editions Limited; Martha Rhodes, director and founding editor of Four Way Books and Chris Fischbach. managing editor at Coffee House Press. Each of these independent publishing houses are not-for-profit.

Fiona McCrae, who has been at Graywolf since 1994, was born in Africa and moved to England with her family at the age of two. When I asked her if she felt growing up in England had steeled her somewhat better for the events of war than those of us who have never seen an attack on our own country, she said she had experienced bombing in London and the attitude was, "You couldn’t give in; i .e., you couldn’t and shouldn’t avoid the airports or avoid museums or the underground. You couldn’t allow yourself to be terrified."

Martha Rhodes, co-founder and director of Four Way Books, lives and works in Tribeca, just eight blocks from the World Trade Center disaster. She witnessed the air attacks on the World Trade Center first hand. She was one of the thousands who ran north on foot from the cascading smoke and searched for a telephone in the nightmare of chaos. Her husband’s loft building is in the deepest section of the frozen zone, called the sinister zone, three blocks from the WTC site, but is undamaged. Since the attacks, it’s been difficult getting through the barricades to her office through the fumes and confusion. She describes her street as lined with secret service trucks, FBI, CIA, bomb squads, National Guard, Red Cross, police, command posts and boxes of food. Though the situation is slowly improving daily for the residents and workers in the area, many restaurants and bars have closed their doors. There is the constant noise of helicopters, barges, metal cutters, sirens.

When I spoke with Rhodes after the attacks on the WTC, she was recovering from pneumonia. She explained the air was so infested and bad that most people had hurting throats, congested chests, headaches. She said, "Every day we are breathing the dead in."

I asked each of the editors how they were personally affected by tragedies of September 11. Sarah Gorham said the first thing she did was to go to special services at her church that night. Thom Ward said he wrote in his journal for an hour and a half on his feelings of the ineffability of what had happened, on the inability of language to do anything that would have any significant effect. “I felt what was most needed perhaps by our finest poets and fiction writers was not speaking, but listening."

Chris Fischbach said his biggest fear was that his press would go out of business. "We’re not going out of business, of course, but I don't know what I would do if we did. I don’t fear for poetry; individual presses and magazines come and go, and I don’t think poetry will ever be in danger as long as people just write it. Of course I fear the same things most Americans fear. I don’t want a biological attack."

Fiona McCrae: There’s a church near where my parents in England live with an inscription on the wall with words to the effect: 'The plague has come through here. We are devastated and there’s a handful of us left alive in this grim, bleak world.’ In London you go up to Canterbury Cathedral and there’s the ruin next to the new one. History and poetry provides witness to the fact that we’re not alone. We have to remember that.

I feel optimistic about the future of poetry in general. It’s not the activity the majority of the public is engaged with. Within that context I think it would be kind of offensive to say times are going to be bad for poetry. I think the values of poetry will assert themselves and be recognized more and more widely, and cherished. I’m not exactly predicting that’s going to happen, though.

In a quiet way poetry provide comfort, it can provide truth, it can provide an amount of connection. It can tell you we’ve been there before. Like that Auden poem that was going around right after the attacks of September 11. This is not the first time something terrible has happened on the earth. It’s not the first and it’s not going to be the last, either.

Marie Jordan: The Auden poem, "September 1, 1939" written after Germany invaded Poland reads in part,"-- the unmentionable odour of death offends the September night ..." and "Defenseless under the night/ Our world in stupor lies--”. The poem was distributed among others in improvised memorials around New York City and on the internet.

Thom Ward: Well, I’m happy that people are reawakened to what the real full presence of poetry can offer in crisis times. I’m glad that people feel this need. I honestly wish that people would be attuned to this more of the time through the other vicissitudes of their lives. I have mixed feelings about it, I guess, because I am glad that poetry is here to offer nurture and solace, to assuage whatever pain there is, but I also think we do our hearts and our minds in our society best to turn to poetry during good times and during the minutiae of our lives.

Sarah Gorham: Poets have always risen to every occasion and responded to catastrophes. We’re hearing from the experts on TV, radio and in the print media, but they offer by their nature very one-dimensional and limited views of how we should react to crises. The difference is, poetry appeals on all levels: metaphysical, emotional and intellectual. Poetry also offers contradiction and complexity and manages to address inner conflicts while offering some clarity and relief.

Sam Hamill: Poetry requires paying attention. We are in a country with a notoriously short attention span. There’s no reason not to believe it’s going to continue to be shorter and shorter and shorter. We’re busy amusing ourselves to death. Poetry requires intelligent reading. Poetry requires paying attention. But poetry will survive. If you want to become enlightened, it means you have to sweat a little bit. It means you’ve got to get up and do something useful.

Martha Rhodes: Now is a period when so many of us are feeling so scared and so skeptical and so shut down. If we continue to shut down as things get worse, which they threaten to, then we’re going to be unhealthy. If the whole nation has a collective nervous breakdown we’re in big trouble and so is poetry. If we can stay the littlest bit healthy and open, then poetry can do its work.

Chris Fischbach: The best thing we can do in time of crisis is do what we can do. Our writers will do what they do best, which is to write. And for us it’s to publish, to get the books out. Really, I think the best thing poets can do is to write and be artists in the world. Maybe it will take them a long time to figure out what they need to do, maybe they don’t do anything.

Jordan: How do you predict the tragedies of September 11 and the current events will affect funding of not-for-profit independent publishing?

Martha Rhodes: I do think it will affect funding. I think the stock market is going to affect our bigger donors and I worry that people who were our smaller donors, but very important to us, the $25-$50 donors -- may not give at all. And it’s difficult asking for money right now. I had a hard time just writing our fund raising appeal because being in New York, I don’t want to compete with other charities that very much need the money to help rebuild the city.

Chris Fischbach: Any time you have a press that publishes poetry you’re not going to see a lot of financial success, so we need to make sure that we stay alive as a house, and remain a safe house for poets to publish with. It’s the recession that has affected us. Foundations and endowments are lower so they don’t give away as much. One thing we need to do is make sure that we emphasize how vital literature and poetry are. We just need to make sure that people know about our books. We hope that people continue to read.

Fiona McCrae: I don’t think there will be a long term effect on funding not-for-profit publishing. Funding is so difficult as it is that you know you’re getting .0000% of the pie anyway, so probably things are going to affect the pie before it affects us. If people are more appreciative of the values of poetry, the events might have a good effect. If people feel that they are giving too much to the Red Cross, it might have a negative effect. We’ve sent out our fund raising letters and we’ve been having some nice response.

Sam Hamill: I’m sure that all of us literary non-profit publishers are going to have a bitch of a time raising funds over the next year or so. But I also believe that people who know and love poetry realize that part of what we must do in the face of all this is to continue doing what we’re already doing, and that means supporting the non-profit independent presses as much, or more, than ever before because what we do is as important or more than ever before

Sarah Gorham: I think our supporters are still going to be out there. I think they’re going to recognize, along with the world, the value of poetry in a time like this, and how essential poetry is for keeping us level and sane as human beings.

We are going to insert a little card into our mailing which will contain a poem by a Polish poet, Leopold Staff, called "Foundation" and it says in very simple language the process of healing and turning back to health after such horrible events. It’s from Milosz’s anthology, "A book of Luminous Things": I built on the sand/ And it tumbled down,/ I built on a rock/ And it tumbled down./ Now when I build, I shall begin/ With the smoke from the chimney. (Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz.)

Thom Ward: As you know, small not-for-profit presses are always in cash flow situations. We’re working very skinny right now.

Chris Fischbach: I’m pretty convinced or affected by Ann Waldman’s comment that poetry and art aren’t commerce. I mean there is a commercial and distribution element to it, of course, but my first devotion is to poetry as the art, not poetry as commerce. But then it’s my job and I certainly want Coffee House to do well. No one’s getting rich at Coffee House, even if we were for profit, but we’re not for profit, so the better we do, the bigger that community house can be for its writers.

Sarah Gorham: We’re a publishing house of writers for writers. We are willing to take risks with work that doesn’t necessarily sell well, that isn’t in fashion, that is just extraordinary for the art itself. We are also a publisher that is willing to buck marketing trends. We are willing to take risks on books that are out of fashion or unfashionable. Sales is sort of a secondary feature to us. The fact that an author is willing to work for their book is a pretty high feature though.

Martha Rhodes: Independent publishing companies are used to working on fumes. They are used to shoestring budgets and will tuck in their belts even tighter.

Thom Ward: We don’t make big salaries. The equipment is not fancy. I’m looking at a desk that looks like it was built in Hungry in 1357. We get computers donated to us. Laser printers donated. Kodak and Xerox get rid of their old things. We’ve never gone to the car lot and shopped for new. Most of our sister presses don’t have a lot of money either. We’re pretty spartan with what we have and we do the best with it.

Sam Hamill: For the first 20 years as founder and editor of Copper Canyon Press, not only was I not salaried, I was paying for the paper to print on. Now I don’t have to panic over whether or not I’m going to eat next month and that’s a nice feeling when you’re almost 60. I was the last employee to be paid and I think that was fitting and proper. Most of the folks who work at Copper Canyon Press have made personal sacrifices in order to become a part of what we are.

Jordan: What are some of an editor’s worst fears now?

Sam Hamill: I fear cheapening or trivializing the horrible of events of September 11 too much. But I don’t have many fears about poetry. Even bad poetry often serves a purpose.

Jordan: What purpose?

Hamill: Ah, the expression of heartfelt emotion, even though it may be witless and brainless and self indulgent. You can’t doubt the sincerity of a lot of bad verse. Some of it is sort of death by sincerity. But there is something admirable about making the attempt to speak sincerely in a culture which is so often utterly and transparently insincere.

Fiona McCrae: Bad poetry is already at large in the world, so I don’t think we need to fear its presence. But in the light of September 11, I don’t think I have a fear. No fears for poetry, anyway. I think that would be offensive to say acts of terrorism somehow threatens poetry. It’s the same as saying now I’m not going to get on an airplane. It’s a huge and hideous thing that has happened and is happening, but to think poetry is threatened is a false identification with tragedy.

Thom Ward: My initial response is that we can’t create anything well-wrought in a matter of a couple of weeks. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are some prodigies out there who can. I believe poetry is a pro-active imaginative experience, not a re-active imaginative experience.

Jordan: Do you think it’s a way of comforting ourselves as writers maybe?

Thom Ward: Yes, but ultimately if poetry is doing its work it’s really not about comforting the writer. Poetry is a gift, a complete giving over to the reader. It’s that catharsis, that mimesis -- the Greeks kept coming back to the same plays because they saw in the dramas some of the situations and nuances of their own lives. It wasn’t about Sophocles or any of the writers, it was about giving over to the drama and allow it to work through their own reactions, their own emotions, even though they knew how the play was always going to end. They kept coming back because it was about themselves ultimately. Somehow the drama was able to make that transport from writer to reader-listener.

Jordan: Well, yes. Same reason we keep running to Shakespeare.

Thom Ward: I’m just hoping that whatever happens in poetry in response to the terrible events of September 11 and afterward allows the transport; that is, enough writing, revising and quiet time so that transport is possible. My fear is that poetry may get dumbed down to a place where mediocrity is misconstrued as excellence.

Chris Fischbach: I’m sure I’ll get a lot of bad manuscripts but we won’t publish them. We won’t not publish them because they’re about the WTC attacks or about war or terrorism, but because they’re not very good.

Martha Rhodes: I think what happened on the September 11th represents for many people the fears they’ve always had, such as fear of loss, devastation, displacement -- and here we saw it really happening. And threatening to happen again. What used to be a huge theme in my own writing -- disappearance, dislocation, loss of town, loss of village, loss of life, loss, loss -- has happened! That’s the stuff I’ve been writing about forever. Eight blocks from me I saw 6,000 lives blow up.

And so it’s going to inform our writing, my writing. I know there are going to be poems written about this event that are going to be heartfelt, but terrible poems. We know we’re going to see poems where the excuse to write them was the tragedy itself. The poems are going to rest on that event and not do much else.

But I imagine there are going to be poems that are going to come from the deepest place in people that they’ve not even before touched on. Because what is being touched on really for us is the fear of absolute mass destruction.

Sarah Gorham: I think there are going to be a great deal more people writing poetry now. I think that tragic events cause people to prioritize, to look at their lives to see what is important and what isn’t important. I think you’re going to see a growth in the number of submissions, and I think you’re going to see an increase in the number of people applying for MFA’s and going back to college. Doing things that matter, things that were on the back shelf will now become important. Some of those people buy books, too. I think basically it is good.