The Riddles of Verse

A Contemporary Poetry Magazine Looks for the Experimental

by Dena Beard

So what of that sometimes-neglected, incontinent art form, poetry? It is not dead surely; maybe it’s just subsumed by tight cliques of the New York elite, with their over-priced black clothes and marvelous epigrams on sex and cocktails. For all those who despise gourmet scenes and the fancy appetizers that precede a truly satisfying entrée of language, there is Verse magazine.

There have been few examples of compiled modern poetry since the woebegone days of the Norton Anthology. So Verse certainly fills a void, which is precisely what its editors, Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki, had envisioned. The magazine was started in 1984 by three Oxford poets and was taken over by Henry and Zawacki in 1994.

Verse magazine, considered by poetry greats like Seamus Heaney to be “one of the most valuable poetry magazines published in the English speaking world,” looks for the richest and most original examples of work from younger writers, nationally and internationally. A focus on experimental pieces has pushed Verse into what Zawacki considers to be untraditional territory. In his interview with F News he commented that Verse has become “slanted toward whatever poetry pushes the envel-opes of the self, of genre, and of language itself.” A recent prose feature, for example, is meant to call into question our prejudices surrounding the definitions of poetry.

So there is a venue out there for the more tenacious poets, but how widely is it being promoted? This, Zawacki infers, should not be our critical concern.

“The more poetry gets taught, the better, sure … but that’s not to say that poetry itself necessarily thrives by being widely accepted or simply by being heavily publicized. … Huge national pushes to have a poetry month, or to try to make more people read poetry, if that entails promoting the least common dominator sort of writing, doesn’t necessarily do anyone — or the art — any good,” Zawaki said.

In regards to academia, Verse has always been closely associated to the English departments of Oxford, William and Mary, and now the University of Georgia. This closely mimics the development of the language itself, which, Zawacki confirms, has a tendency to get absorbed by institutions. Yet there are aspects of the magazine that are defiantly avant-garde, and refuse to cling onto academic esotericism. Zawacki phrased it best when he said, “all poetry, as Wallace Stevens put it, if it’s of any quality, is experimental. It’s one of the beautiful things about any avant-garde that it both eschews notions of a center while being itself decentralized.”

Verse’s attempts to balance an academic influence with its experimental leanings make for a very curious, and nonetheless exhaustive, review of the contemporary scene.

What’s more is that the magazine proves how content can sometimes stand on its own. Bland by some considerations, the overall appearance of Verse fails to communicate the often inflammatory and innovative nature of the works contained within. So it seems that the nature of the text itself is engaged with the play of our imagination, leaving little space for any excess content. Perhaps this is what Zawacki meant when he said, “the poem demands our attention on itself; there is something about the way that language is put together in a poem that ought to enforce us to pay attention to it specifically, and to the texture and materiality of its words.”

Of course, there is only one anomaly left. Why, I asked Andrew Zawacki, of all things, poetry? Well, to counter this elementary problem he replied: “When you’ve been around long enough, and are fed up with bureaucratic documents enough, one of the things you like about poetry is that it puts to work the same words and the same grammar, but to do different ends —which are not ends after all — to do precisely what those other discourses refuse to do: precisely, to refuse.”

Zawacki added: “What we hope a poem does not do is tacitly, comfortably accept anything — the words it is using, the audience it is speaking to, the voice it’s coming from or the voice it wants nothing to do with. A poem should unsettle at every point: unsettle the reader, unsettle its own self.”

Definitive in its pursuit of the best contemporary poetry, Verse has esta-blished itself as a magazine faithful to poetry and imperative to the modern landscape. Hopefully the mayhem of language can keep pace.

Poem: Sleeping With J.A., by Josh Bell; Verse, Volume 18, Numbers 2 & 3.
Reprinted by permission of the author and the editors.