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Introduction
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
INTRODUCTION The first golden age of little magazine publishing came in the 1920s. Among the important magazines of the era was the Little Review, which, with its flamboyant editor,MargaretAnderson,emerged from Chicago to engage the world in a dynamic conversation on beauty, art, and social change. In the South, New Orleans’s the Double Dealer set up shop in part to spite H. L. Mencken for unkind remarks about the region made in his essay “The Sahara of the Bozart.” Along with the satisfaction of spiting Mencken, the Double Dealer’s editors also had the pleasure of introducing to the world such talented unknowns as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. The Anvil, Contact, and transition were other fascinating small press operations, each with a vision and a manifesto to ensure that readers understood what that vision was. The era of modernism was upon the world, and the little magazines were helping to lead the way. There had been a good run-up to this explosive era, with magazines like Alfred Stieglitz’s Dadaist 291, which ran twelve issues in 1915–1916 and, in England, Blast, Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist journal that appeared a total of two times and disappeared. Having a brief life as these magazines did, unfortunately, has long been the rule, not the exception. What kills most little magazines is the deadly combination of poverty and exhaustion. The people responsible for getting them out slave over their work and, only if they are smart and lucky, do not go deeply in debt in the process. Though most little magazines come and go with astonishing speed, some do last. The most resilient of them all, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, took root in 1912 and never stopped publishing. By the 1940s, the little magazine world had entered a gray period. As veteran Malcolm Cowley observed, writers and editors showed high levels of skill in those days, but the cutting edge, the excitement, had dulled. The 2 ❖ Introduction ❖ problem, as Cowley saw it, was “critical inbreeding carried almost to the point of incest.” He longed for the old, vital spirit and half-predicted its return : “Some day the fire may be rekindled. When printing and paper are a little cheaper, or when it once more becomes possible to print little magazines abroad at a ridiculously low price (with a dozen typographical errors on every page) and when the veterans now in college are graduated and begin to make their way in literature, then we may once again see informal and impertinent and wildly venturesome reviews, like those which flourished after the other war.” As it happened, Cowley was a prophet. Not much more than a decade passed between his essay and the start of a new golden age. This “mimeograph revolution” can be traced to the 1960 publication of New American Poetry 1945–1960, an anthology which showcased the work of people like Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Creeley. Editor Donald Allen was reacting against the safe verse celebrated in Donald Hall’s 1957 collection , New Poets of England and America. Allen sought to highlight poets in the emerging traditions of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams:“They are our avant-garde,” he wrote, “the true continuers of the modern movement in American poetry.” By the early 1960s, little magazine operations were springing up in garages ,apartments,and living rooms across America.There was a genuine excitement about new writers and new kinds of literature.The Beats and other counterculture poets caught the public’s attention, and, with things moving so quickly, it was a good time for people involved in the movement to step back and take account of what they were doing—to determine what importance , if any, it had. It made sense for such accounting to take place within the pages of a little magazine. In 1962, Walter Lowenfels invited about a dozen of his friends in the small press world to do just that. Lowenfels asked these people to submit brief essays on the state of little magazine publishing in America to Mainstream, where he served as contributing editor. Though there was no physical meeting of the participants,Lowenfels dubbed the collected essays “Little Magazines in America: A Symposium.” Mainstream was an important little magazine with roots dating back to 1911, when it first appeared as the Masses. It was a good venue for a serious discussion of little magazine publishing. Lowenfels, too, was well suited to initiate this discussion. He had a long history...