The sixth installment of Words Without Borders’ International Graphic Novels issue series is up online—their February 2012 issue. The above picture is from French artist/writer Mazen Kerbaj’s “Letter to the Mother”; the below one is from Polish artist/writer Krysztof Gawronkiewicz’s “Romanticism.”

[The New Yorker] published 116 poems in 2009. At about four poems a page, that makes 29 pages, which means, with a circulation of roughly a million, The New Yorker prints approximately 29 million pages of poetry annually. That constitutes a considerable corporate commitment to verse.

—from “A Passion for Poetry” by Spencer Bailey in The New York Review of Magazines

(Adam Robinson noticed this first.)

We have long felt that there was something missing in the world of literary journals and small magazines. There didn’t seem to be a continual discussion about the state of affairs in this avenue of publishing—no reviews of short stories or essays, no commentary about the changing guard at Antioch Review or new formatting at Tin House. Paris Review got—as usual—brief mentions in the mainstream press regarding their recent overhaul, but these comments were brief at best, and not, at least in our humble opinion, long or considered enough writing for such a drastic change to what could be considered one of most important literary foundations in the history of western literature. Luna Park will attempt to fill that void.

There’s no more void. Other sites covering literary magazines, such as Zine-Scene and the impressive Review Review, have emerged. The writers at HTMLGIANT are probably the most prolific commentators on lit mags on the Internet—Roxane Gay has even set up a Literary Magazine Club there—and the blog of New Pages is constantly publishing news of the industry. Newspapers like the LA Times and New York Times seem to be giving increasing attention to the medium. Lit mag websites seem to be more and more talking about one lit mags. There just seems to be more noise. Even though Supreme-Value gave LP a swanky re-design in 2010 and we published great work this past year (such as this and this), I found myself less needing to comment on or solicit commentary on lit mags as I was constantly reading it elsewhere, and overall happy with it.

Beginning this month, Luna Park will no longer continue as website publishing about literary magazines, but will instead transition into a much more static website hosting information about literary magazines. The current blog will still be there, and so, on the face of it, things won’t change that much. I’ve already been doing most of the posting and writing for LP over the past year or so. If anything, there will just be more of this, and more aggregation of what other people are writing about.

Nathan Brown, our intern last year, already began some of the more static changes for the website, building a basic structure LP can use to flesh out the current Directory of literary magazines & sources into a literary magazine encyclopedia. Over the next year(s), I will work to flesh out this encyclopedia, beginning with the help of our current LP intern Sara Adams, as well as the Literary Publishing class at York College of Pennsylvania this coming fall semester. This will no doubt be more Arcades Project than Britannica; fingers are crossed. Submissions are welcome. I hope to have some more news to share on the project in the coming months.

Triple Canopy 14: Counterfactuals

Without a doubt, Triple Canopy is one the most adept publishers at using the Internet as a unique medium with its own rules and possibilities (each issue brings with it an original online reading experience)—and TC also manages to be one of the best avant garde publications running in any medium. Issue 14, their “Counterfactuals” issue, is their self-proclaimed “first literary, or not not literary, issue,” and like most things put out by TC it is a mind bomb. The theme is summed up by Lucy Ives & Co. as “a sensibility both within and without form, genre, medium”—which includes diagram poems, performance pieces, semi-autobiographical surreal theater from Mina Loy, aphorisms from Sam Moyer, anthropology from Tan Lin, and more work way outside the box/screen.

Monkey Business 1

Thanks to the efforts of translator Ted Goossen and the editors of A Public Space, 2011 readers were introduced to the acclaimed Japanese literary magazine Monkey Business, edited by Motoyuki Shibata (curator, along with Roland Kelts, of the Focus: Japan portfolio in APS 1). According to Stuart Dybek’s letter inserted into the issue, “Each year, a magazine of highlights from issues of Monkey Business will appear in English translation via A Public Space…. The first issue features poetry, manga, a wide-ranging, in-depth interview with Haruki Murakami, fiction from Hideo Furukawa, a beautiful sequence of vignettes by Hiromi Kawakami, and much more.” The extensive, 50+ page interview with Murakami by Furukawa is enough in itself to make the issue a must-read. Adding Furukawa’s own story “Monsters,” Yoko Ogawa’s mesmerizing and disturbing “The Tale of the House of Physics,” and a manga comic based on Kafka’s “The Country Doctor,” sends the issue into the stratosphere.

Conjunctions 56: Terra Incognita

With TriQuarterly gone from the print world, Bradford Morrow’s Conjunctions is probably the biggest doorstop of a literary magazine around, and for good reason. Morrow is one of the best editor/curators of literary magic working in periodicals, and issue 56 of Conjunctions exhibits these talents, offering a kind of literary richness found little elsewhere. The issue reads like walking into a Cirque de Soleil tent, or making a film with Julie Taymor; everything pushes to (sometimes beyond) the edge of the extraordinary. The opening story—Benjamin Hale’s “The Minus World”—explores the lower depths, and sent me enthusiastically back to Mario Bros. video games after a decades-long hiatus, and Charles Bernstein’s manifesto-like “Recalculating” somehow represents both voice and anti-voice, entropy and container. Then there is Susan Steinberg underwater, Kleeman’s “Brief History of Weather,” G.C. Waldrep’s discretions, Coover, Straub, Marche, Swenson… I can honestly say I haven’t read the entire 380-page issue, but neither has it left my desk since it arrived six months ago. I dip in and out, as I would A Thousand Plateaus or The Arcades Project, and, as with those books, am consistently rewarded.

Octopus 14

Certainly there are an increasing number of poetry magazines online, but few of them give such a pleasurable reading experience as Octopus, whose 14th issue is yet again one of the most fascinating collections of verse around. (The reviews in the issue are also fine, and the “Recovery Projects” of older texts very admirable.) The work in this issue almost to a poem seems strikingly in line with the hybrid, rhizomatic poetry described by Swenson/St. John in 2009 (and very influenced by the New York School). But for me, this issue simply contains some of the most engaging, invigorating poetry around—for example. the following excerpt from the long poem, “A Geography of Pleasure,” by Amy King, without a doubt one of the best poems of the year:

…I have never had anything
to say in the face of such prisons. I’m open. My conversation
is a play on the stage of vanity, the who I fuck
and the why I am no boy, how I erase the space
of his mouth’s residence from my skin, how I was never
a room to his marriage plans. I meticulously color out
the ease of nonchalance, the temptation to settle
into permanent housing. Good fences make good cages
and good cages teach patience. Or so the ides of childhood
sell those skeletal portals. I always wanted
escape into dwelling but never held the map’s location.
I beheld the misprints. And ate that choreography…

ZYZZYVA Fall 2011

After threatening to for a couple years, ZYZZYVA founding editor and publisher Howard Junker finally stepped down at the beginning of 2011, handing over the reigns to former managing editor Laura Cogan (Oscar Villalon from McSweeney’s and San Francisco Chronicle took over Cogan’s former position). Issue 92 was Cogan and Villalon’s first issue. Though Junker did so much for West Coast writing and publishing, running an accomplished magazine with one of the most successful literary magazine business models around, with her first two issues in 2011, Cogan has brought out one of the most accomplished literary magazines in content and design I remember seeing in recent years; like a new editor arguably should, Cogan has put her stamp on ZYZZYVA, carrying the magazine to a new level of publishing. Wrapped inside some of some stunning new design work from Three Steps Ahead (I’m a pushover for nice endpapers and french flaps), the issue includes hilarious fiction from Tom Bissell, a band story by Will Boast eerily reminiscent of my time living in NW PDX, alongside more fiction, the usual fine art, and poetry—such as Heather Altfield’s “Houdini at 40″: “There is nothing / that disarms me like milk-cans full of pennies.”

1913: A Journal of Forms 5

Ezra Pound defined lit mags as the home of the avant garde. 1913: A Journal of Forms, published by Sandra & Ben Doller (aka Miller & Doyle), is the journal that seems to be most successfully following that tradition. The magazine is a reading experience, one that admittedly takes time to settle into, time rewarded a hundred times over. (I personally set this no table of contents, no page numbers mass of texts aside for months before reading it.) Intentionally or not, this issue of 1913 feels like one solid unit, a mass of boundary pushing, of pressing words into new forms, of writers so obviously invigorated by language, both its beauty and complexity: Downing, Bernstein, Ives, Mohammad, etc. Reaching again into lit mag past, this issue feels like what Margaret Anderson was trying to create a century ago: If I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer.

Guernica—all of 2011

Some publications have a great year, with a consistency (and schedule) that make it difficult to isolate one specific moment. Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics, publishes continually fascinating issues twice monthly. Once every two weeks last year, I would lose 2-3 hours in the morning reading through interviews with Craig Thompson and David Simon, fiction from Jess Row and Laura van den Berg, poetry from Limón and Cortázar—not to mention new essays from Slavoj Žižek, Deb Olin Unferth, and John Berger. I began not opening emails from Guernica, not wanting to get lost in the texts, sending links into cyberspace. Sure, their staff has grown over the years, but it’s sill amazing this online publication could cover so much of the globe consistently so well—its literature, art, and politics—and offer it all up for free (with essentially no ads) is impressive, and deserving of more than just recognition: it deserves a wealth of readers.

Smuggling Afghan heroin or women from Odessa would have been more reprehensible, but more logical. You know you’re a fool when what you’re doing makes even the post office seem efficient. Everything I was packing into this unwieldy, 1980s-vintage suitcase was available online. I don’t mean that when I arrived in Berlin I could have ordered more Levi’s 510s for next-day delivery. I mean, I was packing books.

Not just any books — these were all the same book, multiple copies. “Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, Volume 1” is published, yes, by Triple Canopy, an online magazine featuring essays, fiction, poetry and all variety of audio/visual culture, dedicated — click “About” — “to slowing down the Internet.” With their book, the first in a planned series, the editors certainly succeeded. They were slowing me down too, just fine.

—from “My Berlin Airlift” by Joshua Cohen from The Sunday New York Times Book Review, January 15, 2012

The works presented in this issue either started out hardcopy or writers were asked to mail in a hardcopy form of a digitally accepted work; the piece, after arriving in the post, then became re-digitized in transfer to this particular here. Why go through all the bother? What interested us for this issue was the bother. How the tangible work becomes assimilated to a(n in)tangible era, showcased in 0s and ones, and the labour, increasingly more invisible, behind it. While some writers chose a literal embodiment for their poems—such as glass (Sargent), pen-in-hand (Booth), or another’s book (Reimer)—others leaned towards a more abstract representation, printing out their pieces directly from Word, letting the materiality show its face in a specific font (Seidner), a small ink smear at the top of each page (mclennan), one tracked change (Price).

—excerpt of editorial from issue 8 of Dear Sir,

Nonetheless, I was disappointed last month as I sat in the bleachers during my daughter’s swim meet and flipped through the 2012 Pushcart Prize edition. Was it just the chlorine making me uneasy? As usual the work in the anthology was generally good, sometimes fantastic. I read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay “Mister Lytle” once again and lingered over each sentence of Lydia Davis’s short fictions. I stuck my tongue out at Anis Shivani. I read Katherine Graber’s poem “The Telephone” five or six times.

The problem was the severe limitation of the anthology’s scope, an anthology ostensibly offering up the “Best of the Small Presses.” This is a shortcoming most significantly represented by Henderson’s disparagement of any and all online and electronic publishing venues. (Only one online publication was chosen from for this 2012 anthology.) Here is from Henderson’s introduction:

I have long railed against the e-book and instant Internet publication as damaging to writers. Instant anything is dangerous—great writing takes time. You should long to be as good as John Milton and Reynolds Price, not just barf into the electronic void.

As if that isn’t enough, Henderson goes on to quote from a letter he received from Clay Reynolds, director of creative writing at University of Texas at Dallas:

Now literary parties are peopled by crushing bores talking about iPads and Nooks, bragging about the number of volumes they’ve downloaded and comparing computers. There is no booze, certainly no smoking. And there are no books.

I want to say that Reynolds sounds like someone who hasn’t been getting enough invitations, but it is more likely he just hasn’t been paying close enough attention to both how much the literary world has evolved over recent decades and how much it has stayed the same. It’s still a bunch of people in love with books, with stories, with language. Now I haven’t been to a Paris Review Revel or FSG book launch, but all the book festivals, conferences, and parties I’ve been too are filled with people nerding out about books in all forms, touching them, clicking them, flipping them, scrolling them, and passing them around. And there’s usually plenty of booze.

Maybe it is because I am writing this on the back end of a Word Press platform, but I am simply overwhelmed by such perspectives about literature twelve years into the twenty-first century, three decades after the invention of the personal home computer, and when every kid in my daughter’s sixth-grade class has an email address and can use Google Docs better than I can. All of the smartest and best writers I know write, publish, research, and communicate both in print and online: Benjamin Percy, David Shields, Kelly Link, Michael Robbins, Blake Butler, Laura van den Berg, Margaret Atwood… This isn’t even a point that needs to be made any longer; perhaps in 2002, but not 2012.

When the Pushcart Prize began in 1976 it was the anti-establishment (for lack of a better word). Anais Nin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Newman, and Ishmael Reed were all prominent supporters from its inception. Maybe today things have changed? Not only are electronic and online publications nearly missing, but so are most cutting edge literary magazines and presses—Conjunctions and n+1 are about as avant garde as it seems to get this year. The anthology begins with work by Steven Millhauser and John Jeremiah Sullivan, two stunning authors, but also ones we can easily find in the glossies. Most of the publications with work chosen from them are largely mainstream, lit mag industry staples: Georgia Review, Harvard Review, New Letters, New England Review, Poetry, Third Coast, Tin House, and so forth. Again, these are largely great magazines; what’s lacking in the anthology is greater diversity and real coverage of the best being published in the indie presses.

Of course I’ll buy next year’s anthology, and the following year, and the year after that. And if I run into Henderson I’ll try to remember to introduce myself and thank him for all the great work he’s done for literature over the decades. The Pushcart anthologies are overall great publications, probably the best out there for representing and promoting what’s going in indie literature. I’m just hoping for a bit more electricity in the future.

Here’s a final quote, this time from Frederick Barthelme, who nailed it back in 1997:

There seem to be two basic views of the Web among literary folk. The first and most common is that the Web is a wasteland, another television, a form of advertising — all utterly unsuitable for literary activity. Among these folk there is a curious parallel between response to the Web and response to alternative literatures. Those who are terrorized by any change in the habits, practices, and product of writers, any change that might tend to disenfranchise them, are also, and perhaps not surprisingly, terrorized by the rise of the Web as a publishing forum. The second common view is the giddy “it’s all experimental” approach that proclaims that anything on the Web is a fabulous extension of literary activity as we have known it and will clearly destroy all not up-to-date literary activity in about twenty minutes.

Both these views are, even in their most sophisticated disguises, silly.

My sense is that the Web is a gun. It’s all potential, what we do with it; it’s a device, a system, a “site” in the linguistic sense, a prospect. How we use it over the next decade or two will define it. At the moment it’s politically and socially semi-neutral, uninflected, a tool for, in our case, the distribution of literary information. Years ago Charles Newman wrote a series of acute essays for TriQuarterly in which he discussed at length the power and potential of literary distribution systems. I know he didn’t have the Web in mind, and who knows what he thinks about the Web, but the Web certainly qualifies as a stunning development in distribution systems.

As a distant planet was destroyed by old age…
—Action Comics No. 1, 1938

He heaves the automobile into glowing sky, headlight popping off, bumper succumbing, windshield bursting, white rubber tire hurtling away. Machines beware of this force. The automobile is green. Bad guys shudder. The future runs faster than an express train.

The plant is mostly shuttered. If I could get any closer, I could say more about its inaction, but I’m lost on its periphery, above the valley that holds it. The bridge on the map is a road ending in a concrete barrier and chain-link fence. On the other side of the chain-link fence is a chain-link gate, open. Beyond the gate, the asphalt sprouts a Russian olive bush, bright weeds, a green beer bottle. The road crumbles off a cliff. Far below, a rail yard. At the brink, on the road’s surface, someone has spray-painted, in white, something that seems to read PUSH…

—from “Steel: Products of Cleveland” by Mary Quade from West Branch Fall/Winter 2011

OCCUPY! seems like one of the most important texts to come out of U.S. literary magazine publishing in recent history, and probably from the publishing world in general. This newspaper—an “OWS-inspired gazette”—is a fingerprint of the occupy occupations, protests, and thinking since September 2011, as well as a look at the influences, origins, and goals of the movement. Obviously many magazines publish necessary, often essential writing, magazines as different as Guernica, Paris Review, and Annalemma. What makes OCCUPY! so different, why it has reinvigorated my faith in the power of publishing, is that the newspaper is of-the-moment, for-the-moment in the best sense. As opposed to the randomness of YouTube videos and most online commentary on OWS, n+1′s newspaper is filled with finely edited, chosen, and arranged texts, letters, commentary, diary entries, manifestos, and responses that vividly and powerfully communicate the diverse nature of the people and thoughts and struggles behind this movement. It is publishing at its best: both relevant and well-produced. OCCUPY! serves as—to rewrite Arthur Miller’s famous dictum about playwrights—a litmus paper of a moment. It is, as Frederick Barthelme once told me was the main concern of the novelist, “these people, this place, this time.” It’s writing and publishing that seems essential when you hold it in your hands, how I feel when I hold Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the first issue of New York Quarterly. And isn’t that what we always want?

NOTES: OCCUPY! issue 2 has recently been released, though I haven’t read it yet. A copy can be downloaded for free here. And Verso Books has “turned [the] gazette into a book, with a fair amount of added material,” titled Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America. The Verso launch party for the book is December 16.

Félix Vallotton painting of Félix Fénéon editing La Revue Blanche [The White Review]. 1896. Oil on cardboard. 52.5 cm. x 65 cm. Private collection.