Six Editor-Publishers Review continued.

Jordan: What does a poetry editor choose for personal reading? Are there books that especially encourage, inspire, comfort, inform, and are meaningful to you in time of crisis?

Chris Fischbach: After the air attacks on September 11 I read O’Hara mostly because I wanted to know what he would think about the attacks on his city. I didn’t find any answers, but I read through his collected works. I read Memorial Day 1950 just because he loved NY so much.

I’ve also been reading Seamus Heaney and thinking a lot about the situation in Northern Ireland and in England. They live with acts of terrorism every day and yet they get by and they laugh and sing and they write poetry. We’ll do the same thing.

Ann Waldman is a huge inspiration to me and to a lot of poets. She quotes H.D. in her book, Vow to Poetry who says, "Write or die."

Fiona McCrae: I read Otherwise by Jane Kenyon. And I’m reading William Stafford because we’re working on a memoir by his son, Kim Stafford.

Sarah Gorham: You know what I did right after the events of September 11? I didn’t read. I went to a convent and wrote an essay about our vacation home, which we share with 15 families. It was incredibly comforting to be off and away from the media for three days and be among women who devote their lives to worship. And while I was there they had special services and special readings and so on and I went to those, and then I wrote about Ephraim, Wisconsin.

Thom Ward: I’ve been trying to listen. Not only to all the media outlets, but to also read about Islam. There are so many denominations and sects and beliefs in Muslim just like Christianity and all its denominations.

Martha Rhodes: Feeling kind of American I went to Whitman. I came across a passage about the earth from A Song of the Rolling Earth: “The earth does not argue,/ Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,/ Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,/ Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,/ Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out./ Of all the powers, objects, states, notifies, shuts none out.” That really spoke to me.

Sam Hamill: I’ll tell you what I did do right after the attacks of September 11. I read a lot of Rumi because he was Islamic and Persian. I wanted a longer view of things.

Jordan: "Yet in the midst of suffering/ Love proceeds like a millstone,/ hard surfaced and straight-forward" (The Ruins of the Heart translated by Edmund Helminski) .

Sam Hamill: Yes. Some of the poems I read could almost have been written out of all that is happening in the world today. And I read Basho who has the final word with this haiku: “Summer grasses-- all that remains of great soldiers/ imperial dreams.” And of course Basho’s poem was inspired by Dufu’s famous “The whole devastated/ only mountains and rivers remain.” Basho came on a place where a civil war between the two most powerful clans had taken place, and he sat down and thought of DuFu’s words in all the devastation of a thousand years earlier. Dufu’s observation inspired Basho’s realization which informs my relationship to what’s happening around me today.

Jordan: What reading do you suggest for readers now? Should poetry play a role in comforting people in times like these?

Sam Hamill: I would prefer that we write more discomforting poems. I think that one of the byproducts of this assault will be a broader social awareness in this country. We are citizens of the world. And if there is anything good to come out of it will be that kind of an awakening. It will affect our reading.

Chris Fischbach: I don’t know if any of our Coffee House Press writers would want to try to comfort people. I think they would say we’ve been too comfortable for too long and that’s one of the reasons we’re in this mess.

People can find solace in laughter. I’d suggest reading someone like Victor Hernandez Cruz, who can go from being very serious and political to being very funny. Ron Padgett, too. Anselm Hollo is also a very funny poet.

Coffee House Press published a book called That Kind of Sleep by an Irani American woman, Susan Atefat-Peckman. Before the attacks she was nervous about going public and talking about the situation for women in Iran, and now she said she’s not nervous at all. She feels she needs to promote understanding. Which is kind of a miraculous thing. She has family over there still.

Another book I suggest reading now is Lawson Fusao Inada’s Legends from Camp, which deals with the Japanese internment in this country during WW2. I would also suggest reading Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Eliot Katz and Paul Metcalf.

Thom Ward: I think a poet who writes with great empathy is the Palestinian American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye. Her book, Fuel, has poems that speak to the precarious Jewish-Palestinian situation. Then there’s Lucille Clifton’s Blessing the Boats, a great book, and Bruce Bond’s Radiography about the human heart in war. Also, For the Kingdom by Anthony Piccione. His poem, "Now is Our Century" starts out: "We know we’ve wandered far upon the human shore/ for the leafy heart has left a crisscrossed path ..."

Fiona McCrae: There’s a chapter in Kim Stafford’s new book about his father’s pacifism that I had been read before. And I read it again now. It’s just so meaningful. Kim sent me a poem, "For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid" from The Way It Is, which Graywolf published. Part of the poem reads, "...What you fear/ will not go away: it will take you into/ yourself and bless you and keep you./ That’s the world, and we all live there." I suggest that book.

I suggest Fred Marchant’s book called "Full Moon Boat." He was a Marine and a conscientious objector in the Viet Nam war and so his book is a kind of resistance to domestic violence and the violence done by your country. In the first poem called "The Return" he ends it on how good it would feel to take a helmet off.

Sarah Gorham: I think of Dick Allen off the top of my head because his book, Ode to the Cold War addresses a lot of the emotional fall-out from the Viet Nam war and the cold war. He’s a poet who tends to take the broader view politically. He has another book scheduled for April, 2003 that will even be of more comfort to people called, The Day Before.

Martha Rhodes: I suggest Stephen Knauth’s books, Twenty Shadows and The River I Know You By.

Jordan: Do you think more people will read poetry as the world situation becomes more tense in the days to come?

Fiona McCrae: The tragedy of September 11 has made people look at what they’re doing and wonder if it’s important or not. Shouldn’t we be getting the news from poets, as William Carlos Williams so eloquently writes? "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there."

People writing poetry tend not to be engaged in acts of hate. Poetry is about one human being connecting with another human being in the most enlightened way, in the most profound way. There’s a generosity of spirit in the exchange on both sides, and there’s a depth to it, and I think also there’s an acknowledgement that it’s not an easy world. It’s valuing highly what one individual can do in a creative sense, which is opposite of a violent act that devalues lives. Here at Graywolf we feel what we’re doing is important.

Jordan: Strictly in the light of current events, how do you see poetry as useful?

Sam Hamill: We’ve had a perfect demonstration of that in these last weeks. People who never gave ten seconds’ thought to poetry have been moved to tears by Auden or Whitman or what have you. I take my models from the old Chinese poets.

Chris Fischbach: People’s literary forms are very tied to their culture. And it goes hand in hand with, as you know, the dominant culture. There are forms that challenge our way of thinking, the same way that Picasso changed the way we saw a painting. Or even the way we saw the world, by experimenting and changing form. We look to both subject matter and form as things that can challenge people’s consciousness. At Coffee House Press we like to challenge and expand people’s idea of what is to be an American. The way we speak affects the way we think. As an editor I’m very interested in form. It’s kind of my main concern.

Maybe people don’t want to be entertained passively any more, and maybe the right thing we need to do as a country is to think critically. That’s what poetry can help us do.

Thom Ward: Joseph Campbell said most people aren’t looking for the meaning of life. What they’re looking for is experience of living. And excellent poetry offers such. Poetry celebrates what it is to have genuine or authentic experiences of living.

Sam Hamill: I think this thing we call inspiration that the Greeks actually believed was drawing in the breath of one’s muse and becoming pregnant with meaning has a certain validity.

The whole point of terrorism is to terrorize, isn’t it? And obviously, the best solution is to refuse to be terrorized. You have to make peace within yourself before you can bring peace to your home and you have to make peace in your home before you can bring peace to your community. It’s very Confucian. So the way to respond to terrorism is to be at peace. Whether confronted by it or not. And to bring peace to all of your deeds.

Jordan: Will the attacks of September 11 and current events affect your choice of manuscripts?

Sam Hamill: No, there won’t be a change in the way I choose manuscripts. My tastes are my own tastes in that they tend a little bit toward the rebellious, but not very strongly toward the highly experimental. And they avoid schools of poetry like the plague. I won’t be looking for "After September 11" poems. I leave that to everyone else in the world. I don’t like the idea of poetry by subject anyway.

As soon as you commit yourself to a theme you’ve given up most of the experience of being a poet, which is discovering what’s actually on your mind. When you go into that poem saying I’m going to write a poem on whatever -- you have built a long corridor and committed yourself to walking down it instead of walking out into the open and saying I’m going to let the writing happen to me. I’m going to follow the writing, and not drag it along behind me. It’s a completely different attitude about the real function of poetry.

I’ve personally seen a couple hundred, more than 200, books through to publication. And a lot more than that if you count the various pamphlets, broadsides and other things I printed in the early years. If you look at the people we’ve published, people like Hayden Carruth, Tom McGrath, Elinor Wilner and Olga Broumas, there is a strong note of rebelliousness that runs all the way through our work. But it’s not a rebelliousness for its own sake. I look for a poetry that makes us citizens of the world. And often that takes place in real local particulars.

Sarah Gorham: I do believe there will be a shift in the way people write now. I think we’ve had a long period of poems with intellectual flash, verbal pyrotechnics and I think that this may be a trend that will dissolve. Readers will need something more, a fuller, richer poetry. Might be a return to poets talking about their daily lives, quiet examinations of the way people are really living. Ann Carson’s latest book is one I hope indicates a trend -- it’s learned, erudite, and emotionally rich at the same time. I think that people will be willing to look at their daily lives again and return to examining quietly the way we are living. I’m a little exhausted by verbal pyrotechnics. I’m ready for something else.

The events won’t affect the way that I read a poetry manuscript. Well, obviously they affect everything we do, but I’m not looking for anything different. First of all, we have books scheduled through 2003. It takes about two years from time of acceptance of the manuscript to publication.

I don't think our selection of manuscripts will change too terribly. We have a predilection for poetry that mixes both the intellectual and the emotional, and I think we’re going to see more of that as time goes by. I have been approached with several ideas for anthologies regarding the tragedies and I am not biting.

I think there is always that kind of quick response following disasters and there are probably going to be a huge number of such anthologies produced. Some will contain good poetry and some will contain bad poetry. There’s plenty of bad poetry being written right now. But I don’t think people will necessarily want to buy these anthologies. So I think we’re going to leave that to someone else.

Fiona McCrae: Graywolf has an opportunity to apply to the Lannan Foundation to do more translations and it seems from our point of view that this coincides nicely with the times. Americans have woken up to the rest of the world and the importance of reaching out beyond your borders.

I think September 11 has just made me more enthusiastic for the translation projects and, for example, one project that comes to my attention is an anthology of Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli poets about hope. If that works out it only doubles my interest. Hopefully maybe some translations will sell better.

We’ve had a couple of events canceled since the attacks on September 11th. We had a bitter disappointment with my first British acquisition for Graywolf -- a Scottish poet who was supposed to come over for a month of readings and appearances. It took a year and a half of planning and at the last moment he canceled. His family and kids couldn’t bear to let him go in the midst of all the chaos and tension.

Jordan: What is the best thing about being an editor?

Martha Rhodes: Although I am probably just as much a publisher, director, manager, I cling to the title as founding editor of the press (along with poet, Dzvinia Orlowsky). Some authors need and want my input more than others. There are many books I work hard on, from cosmetic suggestions to suggestions that challenge the very tissue of the poems. There are some cases where I haven’t formally signed the book on but have agreed to work on the book with an author for one, or two, or even more years with the intention of taking the book on. This has proven to be a wonderful experience for the authors and for me, as well. I truly believe that most writers thrive when they are supported and I work hard to provide that support to Four Way authors so they can continue to do what they do best -- write beautiful poems.

Sam Hamill: Well, when I took on Hayden Carruth ten years ago he was virtually out of print. Since that time he’s won a National Book Award, a Critics Circle Book Award, a couple of Lannan fellowships -- we published his collected longer, his collected shorter, his selected essays and reviews, his autobiography, his little book length appreciation of James Laughlin, his book, Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey and a book we just published, Doctor Jazz, which will probably be his last book of poems. That just makes my little heart go pitty-pat. I love Hayden. I’ve loved his work ever since I was a young man. He’s a giant in American literature and I’m glad I had a hand in helping people recognize that. I became the editor he deserved.

Thom Ward: We read every manuscript and I can usually tell within six to ten poems if the manuscript is going to get to the next level, the second tier, then the semi-finals. We read them through and then get down to the final selection. I think the sad thing, and this is a statement for the poets who are working hard and haven’t had the breaks. Probably from the group of finalists there are 5 to 10 manuscripts that we just can’t publish because of our financial and cash flow situation. The manuscripts will be excellent and publishable, but we just can’t publish them. We’re a three-person operation. I try to point them to other publishers who are reading unsolicited manuscripts because there are some fine, fine poets who haven’t had the opportunity and the lucky breaks. I feel bad about that.

We do it all here at BOA. We fold newsletters. We pack and staple boxes of books. I’ve learned all about shipping Fed Ex and UPS. I had to train myself in media mail with all the regulations. We move information. And we’re trying to move more thoughtfully and soulfully.

I work with the board of directors, write grants, direct and facilitate special events; I’m working on reprinting Lucille Clifton’s stories of her battles with breast cancer and a mastectomy and I’m working with the breast cancer Coalition of Rochester, giving them a free reading of my work and Lucille’s work. I wear so many hats. For closure at the end of the day I take out the garbage.

Sam Hamill: I do less hands-on editing than I used to, partly because I have the best managing editor in the literary universe. And we have two or three copy editors who are so good they’re breathtaking. And they do a lot of the stuff that I used to do. It frees me up to do other things, which is why we publish more books than we used to. But with younger poets I sometimes take a kind of teaching mentoring position and say I like this and I don’t like that and what about this and what about that -- and with people like Hayden, he’ll say, “Here’s a whole bunch of poems. Are any of them any good?” I have to write back and say, “Yes, I think they’re pretty damn good. He says, “Well, which ones do you think are worth putting in a book?” So my relationship with writers really changes from writer to writer.

Jordan: Have any of your poets changed you as a poet?

Sam Hamill: They all change me. Very nearly all of them change me. I soak up influences like a sponge. But I also have a definable literary tradition that runs from the ancient Greeks and the ancient Chinese through the high modernists, especially Pound and Williams. And through people like Kenneth Rexroth. And Denise Levertov and I were close for many years. She was a teacher and mentor and a sister to me.

Jordan: Is that the tradition you mean? Explain more of that -- the tradition.

Sam Hamill: Well, when I was a kid we had Robert Lowell, T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. And we had Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. And that was the poetry universe. Poets like Tom McGrath and Kenneth Rexroth and Denise Levertov literally brought poetry out of academia. Part of that opening of the world of poetry opened the world of feminism if you really think of it. Susan Griffin is a poet. Robin Morgan is a poet. So many of those early in-your-face feminist activists were poets. And to my mind that’s the world of poetry. These poets opened many doors and they broadened and deepened my reading of the traditions of poetry. In South America poets are expected to get up and address political issues.

Chris Fischbach: It’s great telling someone we’ve accepted their book. I like working with the authors and the actual editing, but If you look at our list as a community house, its putting together that house and the different writers that are in it, and the way that they speak to each other. It’s interesting to see that shape and to watch as writers latch onto Coffee House as a community that they want to participate in and support. It’s exciting being a part of that.

I’m not a very intrusive poetry editor. Mainly because I trust the poet. I make them question everything two or three times, even if it just means I put a question mark by something. I want to read something that I haven’t experienced before. I like things to be messy sometimes. I don’t like endings to always be exact. I like to feel that a poem has been built, that’s it’s been constructed, that it’s not obviously a product of inspiration or imagination only. That it’s something to react to and experience, I don’t want to feel I’m having something described to me. I want to be invited to interact with the poem.

Sarah Gorham: As editor, I love it all, but the discovery of the acquisition is probably my favorite part. I love the reading of the manuscripts we know we are going to take, that incredible surge of excitement which is a physical reaction, almost like your skin starts to prickle. You’ve come across somebody who has got to be put into print.

I founded Sarabande Books with my husband, Jeffrey Skinner, eight years ago. We’re a small family and we work pretty hard. Three full-time and two part time staff members make up the Sarabande team. I used to read everything that came across the desk. But I cannot do that physically any more. So I have first readers for our contest and for the September submissions, which is another time we get a lot of submissions. I read a great deal of the finalists.

One thing I think distinguishes Sarabande from other presses is we will take on a writer who has clear, shining talent, but just hasn’t gotten it together yet in terms of arrangement, or of knowing the weak versus the strong. We have edited not only with fine tuning, but with gross tuning and major editing. I would probably say that about half of our books. It takes about two years to see the book in print from its acceptance.