Last week or so, mulling my editing ideas going into launching a new journal (after two years or so co-editing Octopus), I mentioned that I was not interested in a one-poet-at-a-time model -- mostly because I'm unsure how it would accomplish one of my editorial goals, which is to present a different model for looking at contemporary poetry than seemingly agreed-upon models that I think the majority of journals have agreed-upon (that this agreement is unspoken doesn't really matter to me).

Online editing is a chance to rethink basic editing assumptions, if just because the medium is so different, with different characteristics -- for my aims, the issue-as-unit isn't anything that is hindering -- a lot of a really well-organized and focused journal's use (I'm thinking of Jacket again) is as a database that's constantly usable, in circulation. Poet by poet journals are of course, by definition, especially good at focusing on individual poets. Great. Not my goal.

Part of editing becomes a test of my own writing, thinking, reading -- does it hold up in a global/historical context? Not meaning "am I going to be anthologized", but am I operating under any kind of awareness of the traditions I find myself drawn to/drawing from? Am I repeating the easily repeatable gestures of a tendency without an actual grasp of what it is I'm repeating, and in what context did this tendency arise? I suppose I'm a traditionalist in a sense -- I find more pleasure in digging around in the history of ________________ (insert poetry, baseball, rock, film) than keeping up with what's now. Sticking just with what's being produced now seems as limiting to me as sticking just with what was produced in 1978. I'm not ignoring what's going on now, of course, but my sense of what poetry is is not completely, or even largely, dependent on what happens to be happening right now.

So I want Fascicle to be one means for me to account for the historical, as well as the global and the local -- over half of the writers for Fascicle 1 are from outside the US, the majority of those in translation. & there's going to be significant never-before-translated work from key early Modernists. & I hope that will be something people will expect, & that some people will find it more interesting than just more new poems from the US poetry machine. There are more structures available than post-avant/S of Q -- that kind of dichotomy doesn't seem to have the same punch or relevancy once you stray outside the borders (geography, language, time) such a formulation assumes (American poets circulating thru the American poetry publishing/teaching complex). So for me taking a closer look at poets operating in that complex is missing all the interesting points of investigation, just like any sort of credo built around the issue of sincerity flies right past all the things I'm interested in when reading poetry.

I'm going to be holding off on opening Fascicle for submissions for at least several issues -- I want to establish a specific context, and it doesn't make sense to me for people to send their stuff in before they even know what that context is going to be. It'll take a few issues before I'm even pretty sure about that. When Leigh and I were talking the other night about how I'm visualizing Fascicle's focus, she came upon a good image that I think is accurate: I consider a growing group of writers key, essential figures: among these writers are Olson, Zukofsky, HD, Stein, Mac Low, Pound, Jabes, WCW, Pessoa, Vallejo. I can imagine these figures as the center of a wheel -- what I find myself interested in are contemporary writers who operate for me as spokes coming out of this wheel -- not repeating/mimicking the earlier writers, but writing out of knowledge of them. This can manifest in many ways, but many of my favorite younger writers seem to me to arise out of an in-depth knowledge of previous figures/movements -- Eugene Ostashevsky and Russian absurdists, Peter O'Leary and writers like Duncan & Ronald Johnson. It's tangible with a lot of these writers, and the pleasures go beyond questions of sincerity of expression or intent.

So anyway, I sent off my first rejection-type emails today, and tried to explain some of this -- that the issue wasn't a matter of the poems being good enough, but of contributing in any way to this developing context.