This post is a follow up to the one I wrote about Ezra Pound’s “Small Magazines” essay published in 1930, and it draws on the book Career Moves by Libbie Rifkin. The quotes from this blog post are from Career Moves unless otherwise specified.
Rifkin’s book was a move from ‘studies of cannon to a study of careers’ to allow ‘an examination of institutions from the perspective of historically situated poets.’ So i’m not exactly interested in this study for the reasons Rifkin is. anyways,
The book begins (literally the second paragraph of the book) by noting “Pound’s long reach in the arenas of publishing and promotion” and that “In the more populous, more accessible postwar field, Pound’s job was divided among many different poet-publishers, poet-impresarios, and poet-critics.” Whether consciously or unconsciously, a great number of postwar poets more or less continued working on the project Pound set forth in “Small Magazines.”
For instance, Robert Creeley, while planning the Lititz Review, received the following advice from Pound “that the editor gather a nucleus of at least four writers who could be counted on to drive the content of the magazine, and then open up the rest to variety, ‘so that any idiot thinks he has a chance of getting in.’” Sound familiar, poets?
For Creeley’s career, this advice worked. He became ‘the first new poet published by Scribner in eight years.’ Starting the kind of publication described by Pound in the way he advised will lead to major publications in the future.
And publications like this were a sign to other poets that Creeley should be read: “The book impressed literary figures as various as WS Merwin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who acknowledged somewhat sheepishly that he hadn’t liked Creeley’s poetry until it came out under the aegis of a major publisher, saying, ‘my excuse will have to e that the poems, taken all together, have a gestalt I hadn’t sensed before.’” Again, does this sound familiar to you?
Rifkin also documents a similar process working for Ted Berrigan: “Berrigan ‘used [the little magazine] to be [his] big jump into poetry and stardom, as it were.’ And as in many of Berrigan’s longer poetic works, the relatively fixed procedure on which the little magazine was founded quickly begins to generate itself; the collaborative circle widens, guest editors take over, the budget increases, and an institution is born. Berrigan was characteristically ambivalent about the ripple effects of “C’s” success — thrilled by the society it enabled him to enter, but wary of challenges to his creative control.”
Through these institutions, white men reproduced their power. Though they might have friendships or correspondences with some notable women poets (Niedecker & Zukofsky, Creeley & Levertov) “when it came to building and sustaining alternative institutions, women poets seem to drop from view.” Rifkin in fact ends Career Moves with a passage from Alice Notley’s “Flowers,” and a story about Bernadette Mayer’s publication Unnatural Acts not receiving funding from CCLM (Coordinating Council of Little Magazines), a precursor to entities i’ll discuss in the next post.
Put another way, Rifkin’s Career Moves covers the immediate postwar period, and documents a set of practices that would, by the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s, receive government and institutional support. Again, from the outset small presses and magazines were not built to challenge existing publishing but to reinforce it. They are bullet points on a poet’s resume.
