Companion Spider: Essays

Introduction to the Final Issue of Sulfur Magazine

Introduction to the Final Issue off Sulfur Magazine I had been talking with Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly, among others, about the need for another Caterpillar-like magazine that would engage multiple aspects of innovative contemporary poetry in the context of international modernism. Because the California Institute of Technology is primarily dedicated to, and known for, research in science and engineering, I proposed in 1981, while Dreyfuss Poet in Residence and Lecturer in Creative Writing, that a literarymagazine, sponsored by the Humanities Division, would draw attention to the humanities at Cal Tech. (I did so in somewhat the same spirit that Charles Olson, when rector, proposed to other faculty members at Black Mountain College in 1953 that a magazine might effectively advertise the nature of the college's program.) Roger Noll, an economist who was then Director of the Humanities Division at Cal Tech, liked my idea and arranged with President Goldberger for Sulfur to be supported initially for five years. The word "sulfur" evokes the sulfur, a butterfly with black-bordered orange and yellowwings. On one level, the magazine is an evolution of Caterpillar (a magazine I founded and edited twenty issues of from 1967 to 1973). On other levels, the word denotes alchemical initiational combustion, and excited or inflamed language. The word was also attractive to me because it had not been used before as a literary magazine title. There is an extended note on the word at the beginning of Sulfur#24. The magazine originally appeared three times a year but became a biannual in 1988. Its more than 11,000 pages of material have included around 800 contributors, some 200 of which are foreign writers and This essay was written for the final issue of Sulfur Magazine, #45/46, Spring 2000. Introduction to the Final Issue of Sulfur Magazine 271 artists. I began Sulfur with Robert Kelly as the sole contributing editor . Kelly disappeared due to a misunderstanding after the first issue appeared, and by the third issue, Michael Palmer, Rothenberg, and Eliot Weinberger had become contributing editors. Throughout Sulfur's run, Caryl Eshleman has been the managing editor; she took over the magazine's design from Barbara Martin with #37. She was also in charge of copyediting, proofreading, and she often read manuscripts and worked with author revisions. In short, her contribution was essential. Over the years the masthead grew to its current sixteen members. Nearly all of this group have stayed on from the time they came aboard, and all, in one way or another, have contributed actively to what Sulfur has become (in contrast to the lists of well-known names that often decorate literary magazine mastheads).Sulfurriis not, and has never been, a movement magazine. I invited people to join on the basis of believing that they were very good at their chosen focus, and took the chance that while there would be real disagreements among us (see #20 and #22 for the Language Poetry controversy), we had enough in common and were all sufficiently united against "official verse culture" (effectively examined by Charles Bernstein in #10) to be able to work together. The magazine came close to being derailed on two occasions. In 1983,1 was informed by President Goldberger that there was a crisis based on the following incident: he had been using discretionary funds from the Weingart Foundation in Pasadena to support Sulfur.At onee point he proudly showed the Weingart Board of Trustees a copy of #4, which included twenty-two Paul Blackburn poems. One of these elderly trustees opened the magazine to Blackburn's "Birds chirp listlessly in the heat" and read it aloud to those assembled. They were outraged, and told Goldberger that Sulfur was pornographic. Not only did they not want their "discretionary" funds used to support the magazine, they wanted Cal Tech's name removed too. Goldberger told me that as much as he disagreed with this reaction, he had to honor it becauseof the Weingart Foundation's huge yearly donations to Cal Tech (mainly in the science area, I recall, but it should be mentioned that this foundation also funded a yearly "Humanities Conference" on campus). Goldberger, quite honorably I felt, offered to make good on his original five-year funding commitment via other sources, so Sulfur could continue either on its own for a few years or until it attracted a new 2 7 2 C O M P A...