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Pillow Talk: A Short History of a Small Magazine
Several years ago, in a forum on "editing and gender" conducted in Chain magazine, I wrote that I began the Impercipient in the spirit of independence and fight. Independence from the editorial whimsy of others, as well as from my male partner, fight against institutionalized and established literary spaces, as well as for the unique, if still fledging, vision of my generation. All that is true enough, and I stand by it, but the Impercipient also began in the good old-fashioned Whitmanic spirit of self-promotion, as any cursory glance at the contents will affirm. Out of eight issues I published myself in four. Nor am I alone in my page-hogging: Lisa Jarnot was in five issues; Bill Luoma, Brian Schorn, Sianne Ngai and Lee Ann Brown in three. Brian Kim Stefans, Peter Gizzi, Beth Anderson, Douglas Rothschild, Scott Bentley, Judith Goldman, Damon Krukowski, Rod Smith, Kevin Davies and Joe Ross were all also, and happily for me, repeat Impercipient offenders.
Do I hear the whisper of the word coterie forming upon your lips? I hope so! But may I suggest a replacement, far less offensive and, just to be nitpicky about the historical record, far more accurate? I am thinking of the word "conversation." For that is what the Impercipient, in its best moments, really was. Whether between the contributors before, after, and during "production," or between the poems themselves, this conversation was not one of experts nor authorities. Neither was it a game of "one-upsmanship," or of vigorous and individualistic networking. It was a conversation between friends, some longstanding and some very new, speaking animatedly and at times perhaps too loudly, as young people are wont to do when they discover others who share their passions. But, you might object, there are no editorials in the Impercipient, no theories nor manifestos, no condemnation nor sycophantic praising of the older generation, there are only poems! What, therefore, could this conversation have possibly been about?
Of course it was about keeping in touch with old friends' poetry and coming to know the work of new ones, but I think it was also, very importantly, about discovering what a small group of young poets, isolated from powerful publishing venues, had come to value and why. And I think I can say with confidence that, differences aside - and, believe me, even among this small "gang" there were some whoppers - editing the Impercipient glaringly revealed to me that the primary shared value among us was an intense love of poetry. Not for language, because although the big "L" certainly ran a close second, many of us approached it with dread, being, from a grammatical point a view, a miserably educated generation, and not for any one kind of poetry - though there were certainly threads of preference - but for all of it, the good and the bad, the new and the old, the traditional and the avant-garde. The sheer pleasure of words arranged into rhythms, the joy of patterning thought.
This was not a lofty, chivalric or serious love, but rather a giddy and life-breathing vulgar one, with occasional lapses into the sacred around the issue of politics! It was a love that set us apart, more than any "aesthetic gesture" from the avant-garde "anti-art" banner, and yet whenever that banner is evoked I can't help but thinking how much passion it takes to really hate a thing! Therefore even the seemingly tame Impercipient published its share of molotav cocktails, especially if you consider how the definition of "acceptable poetic moves" had changed so much that even a passionate love lyric could be considered a provocation (check out Luoma's "Poem" in issue #7!). This love for the art and survival of poetry is one I still feel, and one that I hope is still felt by all of the contributors to the Impercipient, whether they were part of the core or appeared in its pages only once.
When Brian suggested archiving the Impercipient on Arras I had my doubts. I was loath to go back and revisit this earlier stage of my life in poetry. I also wondered: "why would anyone care about a stapled magazine from the early '90s?" But Brian felt that the magazine told an important part of a complicated story, now often telescoped into thumbnail sketches of the period. While these PDF files are definitely not the paper magazine, and betray minor differences in font and formatting from their originals, neither are they in "retrospect" like this introduction - here you will find the poems and front matter of the Impercipient exactly as they were when I published them in 1992-1995. Now that the project is finished, I realize that I am very thankful to Brian, not only for his labor in constructing the archive, but also for suggesting that we do it in the first place. Except for the occasional and admittedly clichéd moment of stinging nostalgia for lost innocence, revisiting my shift as Impercipient editor has been neither depressing nor disappointing.
In fact there is much that in looking back I am extremely proud of. Among the top pleasures were: introducing poems by the late Helena Bennett to a few more readers; being the first to print Lee Ann Brown's great poem "Crush"; joining my west coast friends and first community of Bill Luoma, Scott Bentley, Douglas Rothschild and Helena herself with my second, east coast community of Beth Anderson, Brian Schorn, Lee Ann Brown, Peter Gizzi, Mark McMorris and Lisa Jarnot; publishing early work by a group of talented writers five to ten years younger than myself, including Sianne Ngai, Magdalena Zurawski, Jessica Lowenthal, Camille Guthrie and Brian himself, and finally, getting work out of a very coy Kevin Davies not once but twice!
I also find the Impercipient at the origin of several my most wonderful poetry friendships. It was the third issue that I handed to Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang at the Buffalo poetry conference in 1993. That Naomi, a book designer by trade, approved of my cover image certainly helped my cause: Damon's work would then appear in issue #4 and issue #7. Dan Bouchard also made his Impercipient debut in issue #7, "the pink issue" as Brian calls it. I remember the night we met at a party in the era when Peter Gizzi, Liz Willis, Lee Ann Brown, Steve Evans and I all lived as neighbors on East Manning Street in Providence. I invited Dan over to our apartment and handed him a stack of back issues. Later he would return the favor and publish my work in Mass. Ave. And the list goes on to include friends close and casual alike: Patrick Phillips, Robert Kocik, Chris Stroffolino, Juliana Spahr. . . . The only thing you won't find as you take this Impercipient "journey through the past" (as Brian, clearly on internet time, calls it) is older established poets. No one who, by my definition, had "made it" was allowed in. Of the contributors in issue #1, I believe only Ben Friedlander had published a monograph, and, with the stray exception, this was the case for all of the contributors to all the issues.
The final issue came out in November 1995. Within a year Lisa, myself, Brian Schorn and Rod Smith would have published our first books, with first books by Lee Ann, Bill Luoma, Scott Bentley, Sianne Ngai and many other contributors all soon to follow. The Impercipient had done its work. The conversation had evolved and now had to change. Since that time it has ended between some of us, but between others it continues apace. Sometimes it is animated and hopeful, other times despairing and sad. But at its core there remain two constants: a love of poetry and a dedication to talking to those who feel the same.
- Jennifer Moxley
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