The Prophetic Gaze of Orpheus: Charting New Lands in Small Poetry Journals

When Orpheus and his Eurydice
walked up from the underworld, they thought
of the light up there, how beautiful it was,
how much they longed for, needed it;
but even so, they'd been a long time
in the dark, too long. They'd learned it needed them.

—"The Look Back," William Bronk

The gaze of literary history always retraces and rereads what has come before as if the comprehension of the present is contingent upon a backward glance and inventory of what has been. While the literary historian may seek to sanctify a text by situating it within a historical context or tradition, the act is more akin to Orpheus' look back toward Eurydice that, despite his desire to free her, sealed her fate in the underworld. That is, the desire to validate a text within a literary historical continuum and thereby preserve a writer's place within the canon can lead to ascribing certain categorical imperatives and characteristics that freeze and crystallize a text as representative of a "movement," such as high modernism or concrete poetry. Most anthologies, with their project of representing and sanctifying literary history, circumscribe the place of a work within certain boundaries. A journal, on the other hand, is part of a more fluid, evolving continuum that is engaged in the ebb and flow of the now: in its most ideal form, a journal is Orpheus at the mouth of the cave before he turns, looking forward with the past trailing behind.

During the so-called "anthology wars" of the early 1960s, when Donald Allen's New American Poetry challenged New Poets of England and America, edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, as the definitive representation of the force of (then) contemporary poetry, journals were relegated to a marginal status within the debate over canon formations. If anything, the journal was regarded as merely a means of validating the table of contents of the anthology. Yet the conception of the journal as less significant than the anthology ignores the role of the journal in the lifeforce and the presence of poetry. As Jean-Luc Nancy explains, "Presence is what is born, and does not cease being born. Of it and to it there is birth, and only birth." ¹ The journal, and not the anthology, assumes a vital role in the eternal birth of poetry, and in this regard the place of the journal as secondary to the anthology in the shaping of the continuum of the "history" of poetry needs to be drastically reconsidered. As a way of demonstrating the vitality of the small journal within the larger body of published and canonized poetry, this essay focuses upon Maps, the journal that John Taggart edited from 1966 to 1974, as a means of interrogating American poetry as rendered by anthologies and journals. In doing so, it addresses, in its philosophical stance, how a journal, unlike an anthology, can avoid subjecting poetry to the fate of Eurydice.

Using Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as a critical springboard, the brief introduction to the first issue of Maps speaks of "the need for making new maps of man's consciousness now, and of the past as seen from that now." ² As opposed to using the past to valorize the present, Maps suggests that the "now" supercedes the past by bringing that past into relief. Within the pages of Maps, the past is not used as a means of validating the present moment, but rather, as the introduction explains, as one of the voices of the evolving heteroglossic poetic moment:

The maps would be of those regions just discovered, somewhat known, but not to the extent of the older areas or of the most recent projections. MAPS, then, takes its title and purpose from Kant's observation. These poems are not on...