Arriving in my mail this month is the latest issue of the Northwest Review, freshly re-designed and under the direction of new editors who serve on the faculty of the University of Oregon, where the magazine has been published for more than 50 years.
With newspapers and magazines in economic freefall, it’s as good a time as any to ask, what’s the future of America’s thousands of brick-and-mortar literary journals?
From mimeographed, off-the-radar staple jobs like Samizdat to granddaddies such as The Paris Review, little magazines in the United States have served not just an incubatory role for essayists, short story writers, novelists, poets, playwrights and critics but have existed as America’s creative and intellectual publishing foundation for literary endeavors, movements, polemics and selected works — whether the writing has been seminal or atrocious, the writer famous, emerging or unknown.
Ever since America’s first literary journals were founded in the early 19th century, including The North American Review, which is still in existence, every American writer of any note has had his or her work published in the seedbed periodicals of that era’s contemporary literature.
In the Northwest, one of the oldest and most venerable literary periodicals devoted exclusively to poetry in the United States is Poetry Northwest, founded in 1959. In the spirit of disclosure, I should say I’m the current editor of this storied publication.
Poetry Northwest holds a special place in my literary career. Twenty years ago it was one of the first important little magazines to publish a poem of mine. My payment was two copies — same as today, though until recently we added two bottles of wine as well.
Here’s the thing about this story: At the time I first published in Poetry Northwest, I was living in Washington, D.C., so you could well ask what did publication in a magazine a continent away do for my writing? Probably nothing. But it was wind in the sails. It was confirmation that my writing existed in the world outside of my private notebook, existed as literary art and a singular poetic piece in a long line of poetic pieces that stretched back, in this country at least, to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
At the time, Poetry Northwest probably had 400 subscribers, if that. More people go into my neighborhood coffee shop each day, I know, but these were 400 readers who knew something about — and more important, cared deeply about — contemporary American literature. Over the years, in fact, I have even met some of them, and they have reminded me that they first encountered my poems in Poetry Northwest.
With postage and paper cheap for most of the 20th century, the number of literary journals multiplied, especially during the ’60s and ’70s. Today literary magazines are financially pressed, even those with institutional support from a college or university. Long-standing literary journals and newly created ones are finding a rebirth in the publishing zeitgeist of the Internet. Today, in fact, there is no cultural difference for a writer between publishing a story, poem or essay in print or online.
What’s to be found in a literary magazine? Every kind of writing you can imagine — from the most traditional to the most experimental. Either way, only a literary magazine would equate a six-line poem like the one this month by Charles Wright, a sestet of a poem, as holding equal weight with an enormous essay, a story or a philosophical inquiry.
As always, literary experience in America both begins and fits in the hand.
Autumn Thoughts on the East Fork
Daytime is boredom after awhile, I’ve come to find, and nighttime, too.
But in between,
when the evening starts to drain the seen world into the unseen,
And the mare’s tail clouds swish slowly across the mountains,
Contentment embraces me
With its spidery arms and its spade-tipped, engendering tail.
There must be a Chinese character for this, a simple one,
but we’ve never seen it up here.
– Charles Wright
“Autumn Thoughts on the East Fork” from The Northwest Review, Volume 47, Number 2
Posted by DB 
Posted by DB 
Posted by DB 
