Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

5. The 2000s

The 2000s In 2002, Southern Poetry Review made a move as significant as Guy Owen’s relocation of the journal from Florida to North Carolina in 1964. After Robert Parham accepted the position of editor, SPR came to Savannah, Georgia, from Charlotte, North Carolina, and as discussed in the introduction, the shift led to key changes in format and editorial style. Although Parham left Savannah in 2004 to serve as dean of arts and sciences at Augusta State University, not far away, the journal remains housed at Armstrong Atlantic State University, where it receives assistance but maintains independent status. It operates with its smallest staff ever, but one as committed as any before it: Robert Parham in Augusta, and in Savannah, two professors at AASU, James Smith, associate editor, and Tony Morris, managing editor, as well as invaluable student assistants . We modified the journal’s format but kept Owen’s eclectic ideal. SPR reaches individual subscribers, bookstores, and libraries (more than ever before) in all regions of the country, as well as abroad, and finds its poets in those diverse places, too. We routinely challenge our editorial inclinations, discussed below, in a decade that has made it particularly urgent to be clear about guiding principles. The official end of the second millennium passed without major incident. Americans had inured themselves to news of suicide bombers and terrorism abroad in the 1990s, but on September 11, 2001, the attack on U.S. soil brought home an unalterable perception. Security was an illusion. During the shock and grief, the anger and fear that followed, the country turned in surprising ❚ 245 5 numbers to poetry for consolation, and literary journals, including Southern Poetry Review, received innumerable poems attempting to give voice to trauma. “Security” is a watchword for the decade. This ancient theme stands out starkly during this decade because of 9/11. Several poems in this section directly evoke that specific day: Katherine E. Young’s “HAZMAT,” Peter Makuck’s “Matins,” and Cathy Smith Bowers’s deftly misleading “For Okra.” However, many poems published after the event, and not focused on it at all, feel charged by it and its aftershocks, even Philip Dacey’s humorous paean to the New York Public Library’s Main Reading Room (“New York Postcard Sonnets, #6”), which describes a haven for people of the word. Also during this decade, Enron and other financial scandals shook everyone ’s faith in corporate pension plans—and corporations, in general; HIV was now global; the threat of global warming intensified; Katrina hit New Orleans. The list goes on, but 9/11 epitomized the American sense of safety lost forever. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, tempests over “New Formalism” rattled teapots on both sides of the debate. The turn to form after 9/11 was more instinctual, however, less programmatic than before. During this time at SPR, many writers submitted poems in traditional forms or poems distinctly formal, counterpoise to the chopped-up prose of much contemporary poetry. For most of them, form is not a post-9/11 revelation. But the sheer number of powerful sonnets (Amy Fleury’s “At Twenty-Eight”), poems in rhyming quatrains (Jay Rogoff’s “Mysteries”), rhyming couplets (Stephen Gibson’s “Profile of a Young Woman”), and poems with exacting visual patterns (Suzanne Cleary’s “Anyways,” David Citino’s “Shovel,” Fleda Brown’s “Trillium,” David Kirby’s “Someone Naked and Adorable”) all attest to the contemporary viability of distinct form. Too, this section is full of poems in free verse that measure their lines with acuity. This close attention to our language always has mattered, but maybe it seems to matter more intensely now. Southern Poetry Review continues to seek the carefully crafted poem, language not in the service of an idea so much as an idea in service of the language . We want to notice the language and the form before the idea, or best, at the same timecraft inseparable from insight. We also prefer poems with some narrative framework. Who speaks and out of what circumstances? (The current fad of glib non sequitur makes us yawn.) Often, this scaffolding is minimal. We rarely publish pure narratives. By contrast, we rarely embrace the lyric mode that tends toward glossolalia. 246 ❚ The 2000s Although Southern Poetry Review never has been clubby, continuity with poets across the decades reminds us of what we value: not a...