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

Introduction

Introduction Literary journals often keep the imprint of their founders all their lives, especially if those lives are short, as they tend to be, although Southern Poetry Review proves an exception there—fifty years old, and counting. When Guy Owen published SPR’s fifteenth-anniversary anthology with the University of North Carolina Press, in 1974, Louis D. Rubin Jr. praised the journal’s superior quality in his introduction but also noted that “in not only surviving but flourishing for fifteen years, SPR has far eclipsed the national track record for most poetry magazines.” Its longevity is especially remarkable because it publishes poetry only. In many journals, and certainly in major magazines that bother at all, as Owen notes, poems are “filler,” not “the main course.” A Journal Dedicated to Poetry: that’s the logo the current editors gave SPR, and we like to think its founder would approve. For us, talking about Guy Owen is a way of talking about Southern Poetry Review. The current editors think of it as Guy Owen’s journal (not to diminish subsequent editors, including ourselves!) because his vision continues to sustain SPR. In his own time, he liked to say that the journal was “eclectic,” looking for the best poetry it could find anywhere, on any topic, in any form. It maintains that quality to this day. Poet Betty Adcock, who worked on the editorial staff with Owen for eleven years, says that he wanted SPR to be “inclusive.” Big names appeared beside names unknown, although the “unknowns” often became well-known enough. He was eager to find “emerging voices,” says Adcock, especially young poets, noting that she was one of those encouraged early on by this passionate and persuasive editor. He was a kind of Ezra Pound of the South (minus the overweening ego), an avid promoter of others: “The sole reason for little poetry journals such as ours,” he wrote, “is to help poetry grow, to help the young poets along, until they can stand on their own.” In taking this approach, Owen ultimately made SPR a “big” place of its own, one where established writers, as well, would want to appear. Too, because he felt that southern poets did not get a fair reading outside of the South, he made it clear that the journal was especially receptive to them, although it would never advocate what he called “a black-eyed peas and grits school of verse.” More on that issue in a moment. ❚ xxix Owen began his journal in Deland, Florida, in 1958 as a small venue for the work of his creative writing students at Stetson College. He named it Impetus. “Great principle,” notes second editor, Robert Grey, “but awful name.” However, before the second issue came out, Owen’s little project had attracted the notice of poets beyond Stetson, and he began to imagine a larger scope for it. He jokes that his students referred to the journal as “impotent,” but it took several years and a move to North Carolina State University in Raleigh before he changed the name. When he did, however, he made it clear that although the title had changed, it was the same journal with the same goals. On the masthead of the first Southern Poetry Review, one finds the subheading, “formerly Impetus.” With the name change, however, Owen raised the stakes and proved within a few years that his journal was anything but impotent. The danger of what he called “a narrow provincialism” requires some assessment . Robert Grey felt that the name Southern Poetry Review hampered the journal , although he kept it when Owen passed SPR to him in 1978. By then, the name had stuck, for good and ill. “Some people assumed,” Grey says, “we were racists and others assumed we were ignorant and provincial because of the term. Also, many writers, not just from the South, sent in stereotypical ‘southern ’ poems which didn’t do too much for anyone.” According to Owen’s longtime managing editor Mary C. Williams, “He wanted to foster Southern poetry and wanted Southern in the title of his magazine even though SPR was never regional in its acceptances.” Adcock says that Owen envisioned an exceptional poetry journal that was “openly, proudly IN the South, but not only ABOUT the South.” He made a risky move, but a brave and necessary one. The centers of literary arbitration might remain outside the South for some time, but Owen did not intend to give that power away willingly...