chelsea literary journal

Why Start a Magazine
The impulse to start a ‘little’ magazine is divisible into categories. It is a subject worth of study, explored in forewords to collections, in bibliographies, catalogs, random essays. One such recent monograph,* (R.J. Ellis, a Selective Survey of U.S. Literary magazines, Stafford, U.K. 1983) in order to formulate its final idiosyncratic list, eliminates hundreds of periodicals that where founded by or affiliated with institutions, notably universities. The reasons for initiating a literary journal in academic surroundings are clear enough: it becomes a house organ for the college, a convenient apprenticeship for students, a sounding board for the faculty, perhaps eventually a prestigious footnote for the institution in question.

Motives
Motives for beginning a magazine of wider public appeal, besides the manifest commercial aim, are also various: to effect an adjunct presence in a large corporate publishing establishment (The Atlantic, Harper’s); answer a recurrent demand for a general report on books (The Saturday Review, The New York Review of Books, The American Poetry Review); speak out politically if urgency dictates (Commentary, The Partisan Review); or get from here to there in the rush hour of certain esthetic ideas – with an earnest manifesto or a modish novelty. But none need stick to a specific modality, whether social, political, literary, or artistic. A subtle and workable mesh (The Seven Arts, transition) of several intents, throws a wide enough net to snare audience interest. A number of those big reviews (The Big Table, The Tiger’s Eye, Botteghe Oscure), rich in both senses, lasted a gratifyingly long time; many have perished, some have been resurrected.

All this is fairly obvious, & only by way of preamble. The strictly independent ‘little,’ self-subsidized, or supported by patrions &/or by the government as an enlightened patron, is in a separate class. If one were to set aside scores of prominent so-called ‘littles’ because of institutionalization or commercialism or special pleading (as does the author of the monograph cited above), it still leaves the question of why a new small magazine emerges. Its conception, gestation, delivery into a crowded world. ..are often mysteries. Sometimes the slow heat of social excitement or a sudden intellectual flash can be documented to the very day & hour. A person is driven by a deep need, or a coterie of like mind & location has a message to expound. The Fugitive is an eminent example of the group idea, its voices, at first pseudonymous, in due course revealed as themselves.

Now I want to propose still another motive, frequent enough though seldom loudly confessed. For a founder / editor or a circle, it’s not always the political momentum, the social ferment, the cultivation of a rare hybrid concept that impels publication-but the very personal desire to be me. The sheer, simple vanity of being heard. So: a magazine is born & rocks its own cradle & nurtures the new. Not necessarily a bad impulse, it often turns into a most respectable & active venture. Certainly other considerations mitigate the initial, almost autoerotic, longing to exhibit. Possibly to experiment, to provoke response, to elaborate shared tastes, to express as well as impress.

Beginnings
What about Chelsea? I was not present at its inception in 1958. Rumors & fictive memory arrange the mise en scene. Imagine the hour: cocktails & dinner; the place: a Greek restaurant in the Chelsea section; the season: spring. Those insouciant future editors punning over wine & a plate of octopus, dressed in outrageous clothes that predicted the sixties, raking through literary I art reviews, domestic & imported. Why not start our own? Right there at that table was enough tangible talent (if still unacknowledged) to realize several numbers. In sardonic self-deprecation, the four or five friends (including two couples) were already chez eux with ready-made contacts abroad: French publishers, German correspondents, visiting authors & emigres. A sophisticated start, with a built-in staff of translators. One was a multilingual Frenchwoman (Ursule Molinaro), another a Greco-American (George Economou), & of course trueblue Americans, complete with Irish, & quasi-Mayflower English names (Robert & Joan Kelly; Venable Herndon).

Stage set, act one. But the props creaked & time was as scarce as cash. Only enough dollars for Gibraltar printers. Thus, the earliest issues are now stiff & brown, mummified by time, their covers cracking & flaking to the touch, the pages pocked with irritable pencil corrections by some editor vexed with the rash of types. A mostly thin (92-page), irregular 'quarterly' was launched. Showing up three times a year, then getting more solid, staid, & orderly, it settled into a twice-a-year rhythm. Ultimately, having found more likely typesetters & printers in London, Philadelphia, New York, & Ann Arbor, it undertook double issues. Alternating these with weightier (250-page) single numbers, Chelsea turned into an annual of sorts. After 1972, the pretext of doubles was dropped until, again, the present one, which is palpably justified.

An Aside
An important aside is called for here. An unaffiliated magazine, without the backing of a university or an angel in the wings, is hard put to subsist beyond its adolescence. Chelsea's early issues betrayed its trials over faraway printers on a rock & its editors' minimal outlay for expenses. With the advent of Government subsidies under the Kennedy administration & Roger L. Stevens' aegis, grants became available through the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. We have been almost wholly supported since those days by that organization & the National Endowment for the Arts & more recently the New York State Council on the Arts-to all of whom a deep bow for their benevolence. A one-time bonanza that extended from 1974 to 1977, donated to us anonymously through the Authors' League Fund, was especially valued not alone because we were one of only five magazines so honored but because it enabled us to be noble in supplying issues to prisoners' libraries throughout the country.

Growing
In the growing years, monthly meetings were set by the exigencies of mood & temperament, with time borrowed from a Mad Avenue job, commercial translating, teaching. Accepted material would be yeasting in shoeboxes & dresser drawers. Bookkeeping was incidental, files were discarded cartons, the erratic timetable regulated by accelerating calls for the next number. Taunts darted from the floor by the staff wit served as editorial obiter dicta, not to be taken to heart. Laughter in various keys, drinks, cold cuts, cats. .till dawn concluded the meeting. Selections were casual, quirky, self-serving, generous, canny, effete, fearless-all with a delicious indifference as to who might say what. Submissions were handed in at a bar or the restaurant presided over by Elaine in her Village days & returned or traded in like manner. Dilettantism with a difference. That difference, that genuine delight in the arts, frankly mixed with personal ambition, produced a series of highly unconventional early issues-disingenuous but bold in their misses & surprising hits. Hindsight affirms those precocious numbers, with contributors remarkably well-chosen in light of their subsequent distinction. The daring, jauntiness, & what has been termed Chelsea's 'moderately avant-garde approach,' at once defined the tone & trend of most later issues.

A Movable Masthead
Waves of social events naturally influenced the character & topicality of any given issue. Editorial interests most certainly also affected the material, format, style, & emphases. The shifts in staff personnel have a relevance to be noted. With #6, there was a two-thirds displacement: the Kellys had left, along with George Economou. The replacements were Sonia Raiziss & Alfredo de Palchi who settled into a stable four-square praxis with the remaining original editors for the next five years. But after June 1965 (#17), the newcomers carried on as a duo, managing a succession of double issues from 18/19 through 24/25. Henceforth, a kind of Virginia reel ensued. The figures in the dance changed, with some moving off after one round, others after a series of numbers. The following served varying (sometimes overlapping) terms, but always with the steadying presence of faithful co-editorship: David Ignatow, Rose Graubart, Peter Moscoso, Susan Wong, Helene Dworzan, M.D. Elevitch, Barbara Pentre (Penn). In 1973, Brian Swann joined & has been associated ever since; with issue 38, Richard Foerster became the most recent staff member. After 1979, the sieve had reduced us again to four editors - & so we have come full circle.

Guest Editors
These moody changes happened at unpredictable intervals. A rotating editorship is not what Chelsea had in mind. Deepseated or frivolous causes covered personal upheavals, job shake-ups, or enough policy dissension to create rifts & regroupings. Of the early editors, some broke away to found other magazines. This summary of staff vicissitudes cannot be complete without citing the salient fact of the outstanding guest editors who were of such inestimable value not only in caring for their respective issues, but enhancing the reputation of the magazine. These in their chronological order: David Ignatow (8. Dolitical poetry): A.R. Ammons (20/21, science & technology in poetry); Michael Benedikt (22/23, the poetry of things); Allen Planz (24/25, socio-political writing); Alfredo de Palchi (35, the writings of Laura [Riding] Jackson); Gerard Malanga (36, anonymous poetry, with Brian Swann, co-authored anonymous prose); Luigi Ballerini, associate Richard Milazzo (37, post-Joycean Italian poetry & prose, with bilingual texts). It goes without saying that each guest editor put his mark on that issue, or portfolio, which fell under his auspices, in the choice of specific theme & selection of authors to exemplify that theme or genre. The successive or continuing regular editors of course molded the magazine's general development.

Elastic Horizons
Having started with an intercontinental flavor, Chelsea has maintained its repute for welcoming foreign writers & superior translators. Every issue has contained some translations & several have been exclusively devoted to other countries. The first issue ran an interview with Jacques Lipchitz originally conducted in French. Issue Two featured a chronicle about Samuel Beckett's visit here to arrange a first American Godot with his then & future director, Alan Schneider. Four included a section on contemporary African poetry, a Russian group, & three tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute. Five comprised a complete novel set in South India; an interview with Kimon Friar on the noted Greek poet Kazantzakis. A discussion of the Italian Nobel laureate Quasimodo & a story by Juan Rulfo, Mexican writer in the news again, gave 6 its cross-cultural look. Translated work in reverse was the odd element in 7 (echoed in 10): Vittorio Sereni's versions of Emily Dickinson & William Carlos Williams, respectively. Overseas poetry in 7 included also the Danish, French, Greek, Korean, Spanish, Welsh;-& the American poets were treated like another ethnic group on our shores, a novel conceit. Based in Manhattan, with its borrowed & now 'native' cosmopolitan air, Chelsea has been in its inception & concept, leanings & curiosities, noticeably international. The mirage of horizons recedes & advances in its waverings: inter-American, European, Asian, African.

Covers
We continued to cherish this early legacy of the uncommitted, unparochial outlook, of being abroad at home, of pursuing the oval without boundaries. The middle-period editorial perspective pushed fitfully in two directions. The incumbents, notably the 'replacements' & guest editors, enlarged incipient interests in other art forms. In a concurrent, but disparate awareness, they reacted more overtly to the impingement of the times-their urgencies & crises. The feature OUTLOOK ON ART, appearing intermittently in the first twelve issues, was rather narrowly confined to the art of literature (with exceptions like the Lipchitz interview). Moreover, the conventional covers in contrast with the spirited contents-reflected at the beginning only a muted esthetic concern. The title CHELSEA in huge letters sufficed, though later varied by splitting the name or magnifying the number. Soon, however, the covers grew versatile & inventive, 8 breaking into a bright, mildly wry display of the flag, indicative of the rasped social conscience inside. Now no two covers were alike. Several were designed expressly for us; others loaned from gallery archives with the artist's explicit permission. Original color or photo covers for specific numbers were created by Savelli (14), Jack Youngerman (22/23), Val Telberg (26), Elise Asher (27), Nan Lurie (28), Harlan Jackson (29), Masuo Ikeda (32), Joseph Kosuth (36), Claudio Parmiggiani (37). From private or gallery collections we acquired work by Roy Lichtenstein (20/21), Georgia O'Keeffe (30/ 31), Tschacbasov (33), Wright Morris (39), Jennifer Bartlett (40), John Hejduk (41). A special case was the cover of 34: our own modification of a motif by Timm Ulrichs, West German experimental artist, but to his specifications. This long-distance contributor has provided us with logos & interior compositions of decided originality. From a recollection of the sixties comes this quotation: “I see them still, the staid and predictable covers of Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Partisan Review, The Sewanee Review; the slightly more venturesome designs on the faces of Chelsea and Paris Review; ...”*
(* The Greenfield Review Literature Center Newsletter 1983)

‘Review Dropped from Title’
An interpolation as to the title change. The first five numbers carried the word Review, but no notices. With #6, for reasons lost in the shuffle of years, the word Review was dropped. Perversely, #7 included reviews for the first time, as if the magazine "promptly felt the urge to replace the word with the deed..." (see Ellis). Over the next twelve years, reviews appeared spasmodically & were at last discontinued after 30/31. Time between issues swamped the rapids of new books. The widely spaced numbers themselves ultimately served as small annuals of current work by writers who consistently reprinted Chelsea contributions in their subsequent books.

Socio-Political Issue #8
With the American stripes slightly askew on the cover, #8 takes on topical challenges. This was also the first of a series of guest-edited issues presenting temporal or subjective attitudes. David Ignatow, politically oriented from the old WPA days, shepherded a large flock of poems in the rough weather of 1960. In surveying the preceding half-dozen issues, I am amazed by the incidence of imminently or already defined names, which presumes auspicious beginnings. I say this with the proper detachment of an editor just then stepping out of the wings, & so permit myself to cite these few: Lipchitz, Schneider on Beckett, Berrigan, Sarraute, Plath. Now, in charge of Ignatow, an astonishingly varied & vigorous assemblage of poets marked the advent of major events. Nicanor Parra, Chilean anti-poet, focused attention with his "Vices of the Modern World." Already translated into several languages, his work was introduced to magazine readers in our pages & in the same year as a volume called ANTI-POEMS by City Lights Books. Surrounding him, other fixed or rising stars: Langston Hughes, Robert Bly, Richard Eberhart, Denise Levertov, Louis Simpson, Galway Kinnell, Allen Ginsberg, JamesWright ....

And #24/25
There was an aggravated encore of this issue in 1968, historical year in a turbulent decade. A different guest editor, familiar names returning, & some exceptional features: Robert Bly's play, The Satisfaction of Vietnam; a seminar on drugs – when such a venture was still daring-Nancy Willard's personal reminiscence of utopian politics; the editors' round-table discussion with Dr. Robert Coles. Social chills & fever affected certain seasons of the magazine or individual contributors, sporadically, as the world turned. There was no doctrinaire fixation, however.

Other Special Issues
Our literary priorities persisted as we watched the climatic changes in the arts. Thus, apart from these two sociopolitical numbers & the occasional foreign-literature issues, Chelsea addressed capricious problems & indulged in adventures now & again. One such was 20/21-science & technology in current writing. A.R. Ammons, whose own work, especially in earlier phases, had dealt successfully with the mechanics of modernity, invited likely poems. Which were supported by technical views of music, theater, even art in the laboratory. Next, Michael Benedikt's number turned out to be object-oriented, with a touch of pop culture. There the poetry of particulars was extended by Claes Oldenburg's piece on monuments, Warhol's film script from The Chelsea Girls, & the surrealist prose poems by Francis Ponge. Not all the material fitted neatly into this programmatic effort, but the overall impression was indeed that of a 'things' issue, a way of "apprehending reality." Another instance of getting up from the procrustean couch & moving around was the putative 'ethnic' issue. Serge Gavronsky's centrifugal essay on negritude & his versions of Afro-French poets radiated into other languages, even underground into archeological finds by Armand Schwerner (with tongue in cheek) of ancient Babylonian hieroglyphs.

Anonymous Issue
Issues have become characters for us as each has taken on an individuality with its number, set by the dominant impulse, chosen language, or mnemonic project. Though admittedly eclectic (as are most 'little' magazines), with issues consisting often of an aleatory gathering of contributions, we have let editorial convictions or the prevailing climate just as often force an issue into being. The 'anonymous' 36 was, for example, the active answer to nepotism, that companion of much human enterprise. We conducted a kind of music competition behind curtains-testing the judges (guest editors), the mystery contributors, & eventually the readers for a while, by postponing recognition until the key at the end.

The Writings of Laura (Riding) Jackson -- #35
Out of deference to those who would question our dedicating an entire issue once only to a single author, we acknowledge a bias toward a compelling figure of distinctiveness, how has spanned time & place to win a supranational reputation & exert a still growing attraction for the new & the newly appreciative writer. She put a spell on us far back in an anticipatory freeze-frame of attention. To remind admirers & perhaps pique fresh readers, I submit this short but serious list of writers who were captivated by Laura Riding's work: the Fugitives (John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren), W.H. Auden, John Ashery, Robert Graves, Susan Sontag. We have had a modest share in taking note of her reactivated career. Ours was the first American look back on her COLLECTED POEMS, published 25 years earlier & a presage of its reissue 13 years later-when we reprinted a group of her poems in 1962. She contributed intermittent essays: on poetry, on 'the sex factor in social progress,' or woman's 'bondage' to history & to herself (still radical views at that time), & of course the heart of The Telling in 20/21. A review of the new edition of her POEMS stated: "Chelsea Magazine is almost the only publication that treats her work, past & present, with real excitement."* (* Lorna Smedman, St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter, 1981)

Ambimedial #39
Imperceptibly evolving, the erratic interest in the other arts, apparent in scattered photographs, line drawings, pattern poems, & more consistently in the covers, culminated in the, for us, literally recherche issue 39, Our concept was-the writer/artist in his second medium. The ambidextrous worker in two or more artforms must be legion in the history of culture. Only a handful were as highly visible as Leonardo or Michelangelo. One thinks today of e.e. cummings, Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, John Cage, Jean Arp, Paul Klee. ...The double or triple talent has seldom been evenly balanced; one becomes dominant, like the left or right hand. There remains the provocative question of the artistic split: sometimes a laocoon struggle, sometimes the alter ego hand in hand with its twin. In this experiment of duality, the second medium was our prime intent & requirement from those who were luminaries in another, their first medium . Wright Morris, a signal exponent of this dichotomy, gave us several photographs & as an unexpected bounty an essay on the intricate relationship between his novels and photography. The multifarious Cage contributed not only a tripartite poem but two etchings. Robert Morris' relief sculptures have words (in deadpan prose/poem comments) cut into the hard face of his basic form. Paul Bowles with music & Susan Sontag with film clips represent further points of departure & partnership of the arts that interact in the ambimedial or pluralistic self.

Assembling a Number -- #33
The production of a special is as often a matter of chance as of planning issues, such as 35, 37, 39. To repeat, thematic emphasis or topical material may determine the schema long after its gestating idea had been conceived by a staff member or even an interested outsider. On the other hand, contributors frequently shape an issue, alerting us by the accidental confluence of submissions. These, by some mysterious common consent, swirl around a subject, a technique, an attitude. This may not result in a whole issue but often yields a portfolio or arranges a parenthetical feature. In preparing #33, we found a score of accepted poems directly or obliquely concerned with persona..' of painters & sculptors, or their work. Serendipitous contributions by Tschacbasov of a group of lithographs & the cover based on his painting affirmed the accent on art. A conversation with sculptor Lassaw in his studio & an etching by Willem de Kooning, with Harold Rosenberg's companion poem, complemented the issue.

#39 – An Open Issue with Portfolio
Something very similar occurred in the makeup of #38. A fortuitous crowding of poems on animals allowed the editors to indulge their common passion-demonstrably shared by so many writers-& there, ipso facto, a bestiary. It is a peaceable kingdom, at least between covers, & comprises fossil, real, & surreal creatures. This preserve did not seem out of place in a typical 'open' issue, which encompassed an interview with the outre Fernando Arrabal & Gene Frumkin's essay on surrealism. The apparently recalcitrant elements worked well in an aura recalling an anthropomorphic medieval bestiary (illustrated stunningly by a set of Dufy's woodcuts), combining the factual with the fantastic. ChelS'ea's at times intuitive, unpremeditated tendency to join kindred material was once described by Beloit Poetry Journal as a way of nesting the egg of an idea, a motif, a mood, in the context of its surrounding components.

Transitions
A good fit in an otherwise random collection is not always achieved. Inconsistencies show up, clashes & unfortunate mixes, frequent in miscellanies. The company one keeps can be haphazard as well as happy. The earlier issues were interesting but disheveled. The later ones, when not deliberately organized around a theme or a feature, could disguise their lottery look with a superior format, systematized contents pages, & more scrupulous printing jobs. Transitions from one issue to the next, or next after, were a matter of luck as much as strategy. The serialized novel by Cecil Hemley was of course prearranged for the first four numbers. The OUTLOOK ON ART series, meant to be a hallmark, was eventually discontinued, with some attempts at revival. There were other instances of connection. Frank MacShane's chapter from American Indian Literature in #29 looped into 30/31 with the excerpt from his The Dream of Quetzalcoatl. A prose poem by Helen Thorington in #36 was extended into a full-length story in #38. Nancy Willard appeared in two consecutive issues. Jennifer Bartlett's cover for #40 was a carry-over from her artwork & prose sketches in the preceding ambimedia collection.

Translations
Our true issue-to-issue transition-replacing certain 'little mag' patterns or conventions & perhaps setting an image for us among the eclectics-has been the steady admixture of translations. A Chelsea trademark, if you will. We have been fortunate in attracting excellent translators, many of whom are poets, professionals, & prizewinners in a vocation-& an art-belatedly acknowledged as of vital, indeed inescapable, importance. We are honored to note these: Willis Barnstone, Thomas G. Bergin, Robert Bly, Cid Corman, Clayton Eshleman, Adrienne Foulke, Serge Gavronsky, Charles Guenther, H.R. Hays, Edmund Keeley, Galway Kinnell, Lynne Lawner, Ursule Molinaro, Joachim Neugroschel, W.S. Merwin, George Reavey, Muriel Rukeyser, Raymond Rosenthal, William Weaver, Charles Wright, James Wright.

Continuity
Aside from the ubiquitous translations, several reappearing contributors have served as a strong nexus, periodically, between issues & enthusiasms. Our mo.st consistent preoccupation has been the figure of Laura (Riding) J ackson -as personage, unorthodox stylist, & dialectician. "One main source of continuity was provided for some time by a developing interest in Laura Riding which unfolded during the Sixties and Seventies, often by way of featuring essays on her poetry... [and in] the form of a Symposium… involving Michael Kirkham, Joseph Katz and Donald Sutherland. .." (Ellis) The incremental attention, as said before, to the arts-including architecture & video, & assuming interdisciplinary forms-has run a thread in & out of more recent issues. A spontaneous rather than a calculated linkage allowed the magazine to remain open & varied in its tastes, as perhaps becomes an independent publication. But leaning toward left of center literarily, we have attempted a modicum of experiments & offbeat gestures, though not disavowing the traditional.

Composing The Retrospective
By definition, a retrospective must necessarily be a sampling only, in this case a specimen show of what was offered over 2.5 years & 41 issues. The expected disclaimer, honestly painful, regards the exclusion of so much superior material. Where the work was obviously too long & would suffer if curtailed or abstracted, the exoneration is self-evident. Where we compromised by seemingly judicious excerpting or abrupt cutting, there was the anguish or embarrassment of leaving psychological & verbal holes, of betraying an integral work. But there was no help. Criteria were often logistical. In certain instances, we were fortunate in solving the problem of length: e.g., John Hejduk's own choice of a consecutive section from 45 pages of text & images. At times, a selection was decisive: the one of a kind 'must' (Ferlinghetti's politico-visual poem), or the irresistible, haunting figure of Plath, or the singular engagement of Robert Coles in a critical discussion. Otherwise, the criteria were back glances on our history; indicative topics of the times; the obligatory mix of the routine & the exceptional. Alternating an open-door policy with solicitation.5 permitted ultimately a balanced selectivity. We have, therefore, deliberately sacrificed a conspicuous name or work to make room for the newer or lesser known but choice example; for the illustrative case, the contrast, the intriguing differential. We had to allow, finally, for the disparities of taste -- & to be honest about it. There were no unilateral decisions. Four hands at the piano & thus many wrong notes. 'Had we but world enough & time'… & space, we might have moved farther afield. It was a sobering labor, of love & loss, pride & diffidence, of doing too much & too little. The regrets & repercussions will worry us into the future.

The Index
The detailed index at the back of this volume has been compiled expressly to give time the arbiter a second chance to be fair. It affords, as well, an overview of the story of Chelsea's course. Because it would be a wicked job to isolate from the wealth of index entries those works worthy of but too lengthy or unwieldy for retrospective inclusion, we want to cite some contributions not already mentioned in another context. Whole blocks of material were eliminated by kind: chapters of novels; full-length plays; multiple translations; extended interviews; narrative poems that resisted excerpting; film scripts; members of a symposium.

Apologia
For other patent, or less evident, reasons, we were obliged to forgo the following: George Reavey'.') piece on Boris Pasternak, with an illuminating group of translations, & his rendering of Blaise Cendrars' long poem "Panama"; Paavo Haavikko's "Winter Palace" in Anselm Hollo's version; "Letter to an Imaginary Friend," a poem/story of breathless length by Thomas McGrath, mentioned as an exemplar of this genre; Victor Contoski's translation of excerpts, extensive in themselves, of the multi-sectioned poem "Umbrellas" by Jerzy Harasymowicz; Armand Schwerner's reconstruction of the ancient, figuratively found, "Tablet I" – a typographical problem of overlapping pages that scotched the temptation to reprint it. Pulling a poem out of an integrated group does violence to the sense & flow, leaving a single or a pair of poems deprived: e.g., Charles Reznikoffs "By the Well of Living & Seeing"; William Meissner's "Messages from a Found Bottle"; Robert Bowie's nine poems, which are all of a piece & belong in their mutuality. Manageable interviews were easy decisions. But Catherine Petroski's talk with Diane Wakoski could not be abridged satisfactorily, nor the double interview with Fernando Arrabal & Tom O'Horgan-involving four voices. Chapters from novels in progress were ine\ritable omissions: George Garrett's "Meeting in the Tiring Room" (cited in PUSHCART VIII); "On Her Off Days" by Betsy Adams, a cut version of which would altogether sacrifice its cumulative & poignant effect. Issue 39 was by far the most torturous to display. Since this was a mixed media exercise, more than half of it consisted of other-than-literary art: photographs such as the series by Gerard Malanga; Alain Arias-Misson's photofictions; Nancy Holt's duo of wrought-iron work that could not be wrenched from the matrix of her personalized explication; the film clips & stills from BROTHER CARL & PROMISED LANDS by Susan Sontag. This pluralistic issue was a lone experiment for us -- & could not be adequately represented.

A backward look is a look forward. For us, perhaps more than any readers this retrospective may garner, it is a digressive reward. The editors, present & to come, should profit by the lessons learned: the mistakes & the small successes. We feel remorse on leaving this issue as current circumstances demanded. After some years, there may be an opportunity to recycle again-but in a wider sweep, to repeat a few inclusions & to broadcast others in a continuing spiral motion.