The third issue of the formal poetry journal TRINACRIA is now in production. Our first two issues were each over one hundred pages in length, and included not only poems but essays, book reviews, and translations of both prose and verse. We expect the forthcoming issue to be of a comparable size and variety. And we have now published or accepted over seventy different poets from the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia.
Our list of contributors includes some of the most prominent formalist poets of the day, such as X.J. Kennedy, Frederick Feirstein, Catharine Savage Brosman, Jennifer Reeser, J.B. Sisson, Jared Carter, Frederick Turner, Tom Riley, T.S. Kerrigan, and Alfred Dorn. Indeed, we were the very last publication venue for the late Richard Moore and Margaret Menamin, both of whom passed away just before their appearance in our first issue. They were enthusiastic supporters of our venture, and their work will be sorely missed.
Despite our being an invitation-only journal, we get a steady trickle of unsolicited submissions every month, most of which we politely return to the senders with thanks. Occasionally something good turns up in these over-the-transom appearances, and we relax our rules to consider it. And we have sold a fair number of individual copies—our first issue had a press run of about 160, and now there are less than twenty copies left after requests to purchase. TRINACRIA will probably not make a profit, but what poetry magazine ever has? In any case, profit and popularity are not what we are about. I brought TRINACRIA into existence for reasons that had nothing to do with hype or hustle.
Prior to this venture, I had a hand in the production of three poetry publications. The first was Poetry New York back in the 1980s, when I served as an advisor to the editorial board for a brief time. That was a predominantly free-verse journal, though the editors were not averse to an occasional sonnet or other fixed-form piece. The second was Pivot, when that august magazine came under the editorial control of Arthur Mortensen in the mid-1990s. Pivot was a mixed journal, taking both free and formal verse. The third was Iambs & Trochees, which was founded by William Carlson and myself in 2002. That magazine, as most people know, was exclusively dedicated to formal poetry.
All of these previous experiences taught me things of importance, but the most important lessons were the following. First, an eclectic or inclusive journal is a waste of both time and money. A poetry journal has to have a fixed and recognizable aesthetic identity. Second, that identity has to have the unambiguous loyalty of anyone who is involved in the journal’s production.
The ramifications of those twin lessons were simple. One was that a journal can have a plurality of editors only if those editors have a deeply shared sympathy of outlook and opinion. Another was that a board of advisors or directors is an absolute hindrance and obstacle to the production of the magazine. And a third was that the presence of student interns or readers is utterly toxic to the task of serious publishing.
I’d like to go through each of these ramifications individually, to explain them in greater detail, and perhaps to shed some light on why TRINACRIA is set up the way it is. Let’s start with plurality of editors. I have seen excellent literary magazines run by two editors who had a profound personal link that united their aesthetic viewpoints. So, for example, the annual sonnet publication Sparrow was put out by the husband-and-wife team of Felix and Selma Stefanile; and the original Pivot was produced by Joseph and Sibyl Grucci. Out in California, Carol and Laverne Frith edit the journal Ekphrasis. In these cases, the married couple enjoys a unity of mental outlook and a harmony of perceptions that make them, for all practical purposes, a single entity.
But if this is not the case, or if there are several editors, conflicts will inevitably arise. Arthur Mortensen is a close friend of mine, and so was William Carlson. I had a great many aesthetic presuppositions in common with both men. But even that could not prevent some friction when it came to putting out Pivot and Iambs & Trochees. There would be serious disagreements and arguments.
What holds true for editors also holds true for the magazine’s staff as a whole. Businessmen have a saying: Personnel is policy. It means that you cannot expect a given policy to be implemented vigorously and enthusiastically if the people charged with the task are unsympathetic to that policy. Well, the same holds true in magazine publishing. If you are putting out a journal of formal verse, it is absolutely insane to have people working for you who are aficionados of free verse. It would be like putting vegetarians on the board of the Meatpacking Association. I saw this happen at Iambs & Trochees when Bill Carlson, in a burst of dotage-driven enthusiasm, invited two persons with strong free-verse sympathies to be production assistants at the magazine. This opened a Pandora’s box of troubles, and it was slammed shut only when we dumped those two people.
These experiences convinced me that the best way to run a magazine is to do it completely on your own, without the involvement of any other editorial voice. Artists don’t collaborate when producing a painting, nor do composers collaborate when writing a symphony. So why the hell should you collaborate with another editor when editing a magazine?
Next, let’s consider the board of advisors. I’ve always felt that such a board is a pure formality which functions to proclaim the exalted status of the journal more than anything else. That list of names with impressive titles next to each one is designed, first and foremost, to intimidate potential criticism, and secondarily, to proclaim that the magazine is serious. After all, people will think twice before criticizing a journal that lists Herr Professor Doktor Scheissmeister of Columbia University on its advisory board. This was certainly the case with the defunct magazine Hellas, where the editor Gerald Harnett was desperate to get august names listed on his title-page. He even once begged me to arrange for symbolic office space for Hellas at New York University, so that he could ostentatiously put down that school as an alternative mailing address for the magazine. That’s how obsessed he was with appearances. A board of advisors for a poetry journal is at best purely symbolic (the members are usually left unconsulted about what actually goes into an issue), and at worst a source of paralysis, with unending argument and debate over what gets accepted. It is a useless appendage that can easily be dispensed with.
Finally, what about student interns and readers? This little group is always a trouble and an annoyance. The basic idea behind it seems to be that these unpaid flunkies do the dirty work of typing, layout, proofing, and posting, along with a preliminary perusal of submissions to clear out the slag from the smelting pot. Meanwhile the official editorial staff sits back in lofty splendor, making all final decisions and writing the introduction to each issue, and thereby not soiling their precious hands with the nuts-and-bolts operation of the magazine.
It’s a very big mistake. Having interns go through submissions to do a preliminary weeding out of bad poems is a terrible practice, and I’m amazed that any serious editor of principle would stoop to it. Consider what such a practice means. A group of teenage undergraduates of limited education and unformed literary sensibility is given the privilege of determining what work gets seen by the editors. Is that really wise? Teenagers have many fine qualities, but maturity, tempered judgment, and immunity to fashion are not usually in the list. And as undergraduates, they tend to parrot the viewpoints of their favorite teachers, and they are profoundly influenced by peer pressure. There is no better recipe for having a dull, conformist, and trendy magazine than letting a group of undergraduate interns make the preliminary selection of poems.
It was different in the past. When H.L. Mencken edited The American Mercury back in the 1920s, he used newly-minted college graduates to do the intern jobs described above. They were young English majors from Ivy League schools, probably no more than twenty-two or twenty-three years of age. But back then, an Ivy League degree in English Lit meant something. Mencken could trust that these young readers had a literary sensibility, and could easily separate the garbage from the worthwhile submissions. He even told them that about ninety-five percent of the material received over the transom at The American Mercury was pure dreck, and that he expected them to have it rejected and in the return mail within twenty-four hours. The other five percent was to be forwarded to his desk.
That simply can’t be done today. You can no longer expect that a college English major from any school will have a dependable sense of good literature. There has been a complete collapse in the teaching of all the humanities, but English has been especially hard hit. Graduates are emerging from college with a cloudy, vague, multiculturalist mindset that is theoretically disinclined to judge any work by rigorous aesthetic criteria. All that these graduates know are the clichés of a race/class/gender/cultural-context approach to literature, backed up by a smattering of inadequate reading in “diversity” studies. Do you really want persons like that determining what goes into your magazine? I don’t.
Well, all that explains why TRINACRIA is a one-man-band, so to speak. I simply could not trust anyone to be faithful to my concept of what the magazine should be. But what exactly was that concept? What motivated me to make the effort in the first place?
TRINACRIA was born when I decided that there had to be a space to publish worthwhile poems that were being ignored or blackballed by other magazines because of content, or style, or political presuppositions. A serious censorship problem exists in the poetry world, and I resolved to attack it head-on.
Let me be perfectly frank about what I mean by this, and talk about how content, style, and political presuppositions are routinely censored here in the United States. Content is censored when editors refuse to print poems of an overt sexual nature that use explicit sexual terms, particularly if these poems are of a comic or satiric nature. The force behind such censorship is twofold—the first is natural North American middle-class prissiness, and the second is totalitarian feminism. It is next to impossible to get a comic or satiric sexual poem published today, especially in the uptight venues of new formalism, most of which seem to be run by The Ladies Moral Uplift League, or the PTA. Besides this, there is a very strong disinclination to publish poems that deal with intense violence, drug use, or prostitution.
Style is censored when rigorously metrical poems with recognizable stress patterns are passed over by editors. This practice is open and blatant in free-verse journals, to be sure, and one can’t really object to it in those cases. But there is also an unmentioned Gentlemen’s Agreement among many formalist publications generally to avoid such verse in favor of vague, uncertain, and experimentally hazy crap, where there is only a reminiscence of meter. I don’t know why this Gentlemen’s Agreement exists, but it is real and it is effective.
Now let’s look at politics. Political presuppositions are censored whenever the straightforward expression of a politically incorrect viewpoint is rejected on those grounds alone. The articulation of non-liberal or right-wing opinion in a poem is taboo in all the mainstream journals, most of which cater to tweedy left-liberal types in and out of the academy. With very few exceptions, editors are politically left-wing, ranging from squishy-soft liberal to hard socialist. Anybody who tries to tell you that this is not so is either a mental defective, or lying through his teeth. The denizens of the mainstream poetry world are overwhelmingly left-liberal, and they have no moral compunctions about silencing or marginalizing anyone who isn’t. Ask Paul Stevens, the editor of The Flea, about the unending harassment and pressure he received because he dared to publish the work of non-liberal poets. And at Iambs & Trochees, Bill Carlson and I were on the receiving end of considerable hate-mail because we presumed to publish poems that were not in accord with left-liberal ideology.
I decided that TRINACRIA would violate all three of these taboos in a very in-your-face way. First, we were going to publish comic and satiric sexual poems, like Juliana Beedy’s “The Wife’s Lament,” and Malcolm Paige’s “The Song of the Trannie,” and Angelique Wellish’s “Triolets for Three Girls.” I don’t care who didn’t like these poems, and I especially don’t care if anyone was offended by them. Moreover, I determined that I was going to say exactly what I thought, in no uncertain terms, about the problems of the poetry world, as I did in the poem “Ex Cathedra.” There are no restrictions on language in TRINACRIA. You can call a spade a spade in our journal, or even a fucking spade if you prefer. We are not a church picnic for Boston Episcopalians. Moreover, I decided that we were going to publish poems of intense violence, like Melissa Peralta’s “The Convent by Molinos.”
Second, we firmly decided that we would not publish any poem that took more than minor traditional liberties with metrics. Now I have tried to be fair and grant a certain latitude to some poets in this matter. I realize that many poets do not write the sort of rigorously tight line that I prefer. I’ll make allowances for that. Nevertheless, I am not about to print someone’s half-syllabic, heterometric, oversubstituted, end-sprung, split-level, unpunctuated, experimental, hybrid sonnet-ghazal. That simply won’t happen. I don’t care who you are, or what your reputation is, or how many bigshot friends you’ve got in the po-biz world. If you want to experiment, go work in a laboratory. We don’t need you in TRINACRIA. Unlike the Republican Party, we are not a Big Tent.
Third, we at TRINACRIA have consciously chosen to publish poems of a politically controversial nature. As it says in our Statement of Core Principles, we specifically refuse to evaluate any poem by the yardstick of political correctness. Hence we have published Malcolm Paige’s attacks on academia, Mark Allinson’s pungent judgments on leftists, Leo Yankevich’s anti-communist pieces, and Melissa Peralta’s pro-Franco poems. If you’re not comfortable with that… well, you don’t have to read the magazine, do you? TRINACRIA is not answerable to anyone for what we choose to print.
Another aspect of TRINACRIA—indeed, the one that seems to evoke the most surprise—is our refusal of any subscriptions. My decision to take this path was influenced by past experiences with subscriptions lists, all of them bad.
Subscription lists are always a distraction and a source of confusion. At Iambs & Trochees, keeping track of who paid for what while maintaining a file of current addresses took up a great deal of Bill Carlson’s time—time that could have been more usefully spent in improving the magazine. Besides this, there are always some annoying and ditzy types among your subscribers, like the cheapskate who wants a huge discount for buying ten copies of the magazine, or the overoptimistic idiot who wants to pay for his subscription five years in advance, or the little old lady who pesters you to send a free copy to her nephew in New Zealand. Stuff like this drove Bill Carlson crazy. Prompted by a desire to avoid such nonsense at TRINACRIA, I conceived the idea of having no subscription list at all for the journal. Two complimentary copies would go to each actual contributor, and if they or anyone else wanted another copy, they would simply send me a check. In one stroke I had solved the distribution problem. No subscription list, no discounts, no future obligations, no tedious little nerds complaining about which issue they were entitled to received—all of that crap had been circumvented.
This policy also had a significant side-effect in terms of the magazine’s tone and morale, you might say. We weren’t out there hustling. We weren’t pushing ourselves on people like obnoxious door-to-door salesmen. We weren’t worrying about audience response, or angling for grants, or buttering up some Tenure Committee. And if someone said to us “I’m not going to buy TRINACRIA or read it,” we could always reply “Who the hell asked you to?” There’s a tremendous sense of liberation in that.
Well, that’s about it. I’ve told you all you need to know about the magazine, and the reasons for its existence. I’ll simply add that we are privately funded, privately produced, and privately distributed, and therefore owe neither money nor deference to anyone. And I’ll end by expressing my heartfelt thanks to all whose encouragement and support gave me the energy to undertake this project. I can only mention a few, but I would especially like to express my gratitude to Helen Palma, Arthur Mortensen, Sally Cook, Russell Bittner, Jennifer Reeser, Michael R. Burch, Samuel Maio, and Alfred Dorn, as well as to the late Richard Moore and Margaret Menamin, both of whom looked forward to TRINACRIA’s appearance, but did not live to see it. Pax manibus eorum. I must also thank my colleagues in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College, CUNY, for their unfailing patience and understanding. And most of all, I have an unpayable debt to Count Leo Yankevich of Gliwice, Poland, whose formidable skills as a computer expert made possible our magazine’s top-notch website, and whose generosity, courage, tenacity, and passion for the art made me see that something like TRINACRIA could be more than just a dream.
