Family photo of Ted Solotaroff, published in the Washington Post obituary

“I was fascinated from about the age of eighteen by the notion, the abstract, almost Platonic notion of a physical thing that was at the same time a communal phenomenon….a symposium. A gathering. A party.” —Raymond Smith

In the past years, literary magazines have lost some of their best editors—such as George Plimpton of The Paris Review, who died in 2003, and Ted Solotaroff of New American Review, who died in 2008. Aside from perhaps Plimpton, many editors are often sadly forgotten to literary history, quite unlike many of the authors they spent a portion of their lives publishing. It is nice to see otherwise. In last week’s issue of The New Yorker, Joyce Carol Oates remembers the final days of her late husband Raymond Smith, editor of the canonical Canadian literary magazine Ontario Review:

Forever after, you will recognize those places–previously invisible, indiscernible–where memory pools accumulate. All the waiting areas of hospitals, hospital rooms, and, in particular, those regions of the hospital reserved for the very ill: Telemetry, Intensive Care. You will not wish to return to these places, where memory pools lie underfoot, as treacherous as acid…

And, in memory of the founding editor of one of America’s most spectacular literary magazines—Grand Street—The Nation published in last week’s issue the poem “Epitaph for Ben Sonnenberg” by Anne Carson:

But still!

being but a tree

one cannot ask them

pines touched by his sleeve’s passing

where to go…