Six Editor-Publishers Review continued.

Fiona McCrae: I feel that what we do is something good and important. I think in many ways we are dealing with the truth. I think a lot of people on their jobs are not. Something like September 11 happens and you think about what are you doing, and you think, well, we’ve published Full Moon Boat by Fred Marchant this year that has got some Vietnamese translations in it and it’s about resisting violence and you know, then you feel like you were right to have done that. You’re doing something good even though it’s not widely recognized what you’re doing. You’re not adding to violence in any way and you’re contributing to the culture of your times. You’re using language in a very precise and detailed way that is so precise and detailed it is capable of ambiguity, which is the exact opposite of the way a terrorist thinks and governments need to talk and think. Some of the language in times like this can be very distorting, and you know the way language is used can be misleading and it can be lead to thoughts which are misleading. That’s not the kind of language we’re dealing with in our books. It’s more truthful, therefore more meaningful.

I like poetry that is challenging in some way, fresh with language-- that avoids the over-easy. We don’t go for a style or an individual school. We rather like to be varied. Some of the stuff that is called experimental I find hard sometimes to connect with. The bad kind, you know what I mean. If you do it well I think it can be very successful, but I think some people use experimental modes as an excuse to write something semi-formed or not thought through very well. I don’t write poetry, I just edit it.

Thom Ward: I don’t think poets realize in these small literary houses what the hell goes on. How many details, how much business work is going on. We don’t sit around, and it would be wonderful if we could, sit around and talk about Catalluses’s influence on Baudelaire. We have to get the spread sheets out for the board meeting and I have this grant application, and all these promotional cards and review copies and the interns are here doing the data bases and there’s a number of days when we don’t even talk about poetry.

Jordan: Do you think poetry should have a healing power?

Sam Hamill: I think that good poetry brings us closer to sanity during times of insanity. Poetry is more real than movies or television or 99.9% of most fiction. It’s more often than not an actual response to certain given circumstances, which allows the reader or listener to enter that authentic experience in a humane way.

Sarah Gorham: First of all poets have always risen to the occasion and responded to catastrophes of culture like this and people have sought them out, sought out their poems for meaning. And in particular now, because of TV coverage and internet coverage and radio coverage we heard from the literary experts, the politicians, the psychologists, the financial advisors, and even from the victims, and they offer by their nature one-dimensional views of how we should react such a crisis. There’s nothing wrong with this, but the advice and the testimonials that we give are very one-dimensional and limited and we have a hunger for information now. The difference is that poetry offers an unusual depth of reaction. Metaphysical, emotional, intellectual and it also offers contradiction, complexity, which all of us are feeling. Poetry manages to mix it all together in one package offering some clarity and relief. I think poetry has the capability of bringing the spiritual life and literary life together. Again, it’s that issue of complexity.

Jordan: An ad for the Brooklyn Academy of Music reads, “Art can provide hope.” Do you agree?

Martha Rhodes: I think art certainly can provide hope. To the heart that is closed, I think art can help open that heart. I do think that people turn to poetry for hope. Art and especially poetry is a way of putting order and structure to chaotic feelings.

Chris Fischbach: I don’t think of poetry as therapy, though for some people poetry can provide therapy and help them get through trauma and grief. Poetry can help people express their emotions and that’s great, you know, but those people write because they need to, not because they’re trying to get published. I don’t think poetry can help prevent further attacks, but it can help to foster a better world.

Fiona McCrae: I don’t have high hopes, but I have hope.

Martha Rhodes of Four Way Books, has published two books of poems, At the Gate (Provincetown Arts Press) and Perfect Disappearance, which won the 2000 Green Rose Book Prize from New Issues Press at Western Michigan University. Her poem, "Into the Lake, the House" begins: "The wind’s having trouble/ deciding whether/ to raise the house/ or not,/ ripping it across the sky, or/ ever so gently brushing by,/ barely a shudder./ Unlike some,/ less cautious, less/ concerned, this wind/ is tired of tragedies ..."

Sarah Gorham is a poet as well as editor and publisher and says she has been in the "po-biz" for 25 years with three books of poems published. Her second book won the Levis Four Way Books award. She sent me two of her poems. One entitled "The Minor Stations" begins: "When you walk so early others sleep/ --And doesn’t nature admire that in you/ though for safety you run your hand along the fence/ Then the light’s high enough/ to decipher a little trail marked This way in stone ... "

Sam Hamill’s has to stop and think about how many books have been published of his work. "About 30-35 books,something like that" he says in a soft voice. "A dozen volumes of poetry and three volumes of essays and the rest are translations of Japanese, Chinese, Greek, Latin and Estonian." Thom Ward of BOA Editions has published Small Boat With Oars of Different Size with Carnegie Mellon University Press and does regular readings, as well as making appearances in elementary schools. Here are ending words from his poem, "Dark Underfoot," which he dedicated to his children: "... More Light! More Light! Goethe cried./ And so do we. But who will trace/ what is dark underfoot?/ Who will wait for the nightcrawler to sing?"

Thom Ward: I would argue that almost too much poetry is being published today. There’s too much poetry that’s mediocre. It’s not excellent poetry because it’s not playing for the metaphysical stakes. I say that with all the hats I wear at BOA Editions, and I say that at some point, as much as I want my poems to have those things happen, at some point if at least realize that some poems just aren’t going to make it. Some of my poems haven’t seen the light of day because I’ve woken up in the process and said this can stay in the notebook or this has been worked on with enough drafts but it just doesn’t have the right stuff to go where the excellence happens-- where the poem ultimately becomes this gift for the reader, and becomes part of the reader’s body. If it can’t make that transference, really, what’s the point in getting it out there? Although we have to write those poems.

I still think I’m a stronger editor than I am a poet. I am trying to say this without judgment, but people think they can write poetry because they have facility with language. They write what I call crafted mediocrity, very accomplished B- poems where they describe landscapes. Believe me, I’ve written plenty of that kind of stuff in my younger years so I know where I come from. I’ve been fortified by my teachers. There’s a great poem by Robert Bly we published in a pamphlet called, "Gratitude to Old Teachers." The lead poem just blows people away. And it’s how I feel about my life in poetry, how lucky I’ve been to be around poets who have helped me develop, not just aesthetically but soulfully:

"When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake/ We place our feet where they have never been./ We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy./ Who is down there but our old teachers./ Water that once could take no human weight--/ We were students then -- holds up our feet./ And goes on ahead of us, for a mile./ Beneath us the teachers and around us, the stillness."

Jordan: A lot of writers have said we find out who we are by writing. Do you agree?

Chris Fischbach: That may be true, but it’s not something I normally think about when I’m writing. Or reading. I’m not trying to figure out my emotions when I write. Maybe subconsciously I am -- but when I read someone else’s poems, at least the poems I like to read, I’m not trying to figure out who they are. I’m more interested in the way a poem is put together formally and the way it sounds. I look for how the poet is mediating his culture through their work.

Sarah Gorham: I believe writers are chosen. I think writers have to write. Why else would you knock your head against the wall for so many years? It’s not an art that comes easily, at least it doesn’t to me. And there are no financial rewards. It makes sense that editors of poetry are poets themselves. It does make for a perfect fit, although you do have to have good business sense and organizational skills. Writers know what writers want, and know what readers want, too, to a certain degree. So it’s not surprising poetry editors would be poets. It’s lovely to be able to stay in the profession, to be in touch with words all day long. Teaching is usually the only other option available to writers.

Thom Ward: Right now I think it’s very important that we are literalists of the imagination, not literalists of the literal. I think there’s a trap if you follow the headlines. We should listen, but to take that and try to write from that we can fall easily into the trap of being a literalist of the literal as opposed to being a literalist of the imagination. I can see myself months from now, or years from now, coming sideways and slant, distilling and waiting for that circumference, as Dickinson said, so my mind can come all the way around the events so that I have forgotten the news details and I’ve come into a deeper relationship with the other forces and ideas beneath and around them, but not just to scream headlines back at people.

Martha Rhodes: All these events are going to inform my writing in the future. Reading, writing and thinking about poems is what I love to do.

The convictions of these independent editors and publishers could perhaps be best expressed in Sam Hamill’s words from his poem, "Salutation, Late Autumn, 1991" (Gratitudes, BOA Editions, 1998): "Today, the world’s good. I raise a cup:/ what I love most, I have given away."

Marie Jordan’s book of poetry is Slow Dance on Stilts. Her poems, fiction, reviews and articles have appeared and are forthcoming in Poetry International, New Letters, New Texas, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College and teaches poetry and creative writing at Mira Costa College in Oceanside, California.