Arras Introduction
Edited by Jennifer Moxley in Providence, Rhode Island, from 1992 to 1995, The Impercipient was a small, stapled and photocopied magazine devoted to writing by Moxley’s contemporaries. Its title joined Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Impercipient,” with its image of being unable to see what others see, to William Blake’s “silent pillow,” turning private uncertainty and intimate conversation into an emblem for a generation of poets working largely outside established publishing institutions. The Electronic Poetry Center describes it simply and accurately as a magazine dedicated to publishing the work of Moxley’s contemporaries.
The magazine appeared at a transitional moment in American experimental poetry. Language writing remained a powerful influence, especially in its use of disjunction, parataxis, found language, and its suspicion of an uncomplicated lyric voice. But many younger writers were beginning to redirect those techniques toward emotion, friendship, autobiography, humor, gossip, and renewed forms of lyric address. Moxley would later describe the problem of writing “after” Language poetry as one of finding forms adequate to a particular historical moment rather than merely repeating an inherited avant-garde style. The Impercipient became one place where that change could occur without being announced as a new school or program. (Moxley, “After Language Poetry”)
Its contributors included Benjamin Friedlander, Helena Bennett, Lee Ann Brown, Bill Luoma, Rod Smith, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Davies, Peter Gizzi, Sianne Ngai, Brian Schorn, and many others. At the time, most were emerging writers connected through overlapping communities in Providence and Brown University, New York, Washington, D.C., Buffalo, and the independent small-press circuit. They exchanged poems through readings, chapbooks, correspondence, magazines, and, increasingly, electronic forums such as the Buffalo Poetics List. A contemporary Segue catalogue shows The Impercipient circulating beside other fugitive magazines and presses that formed the material infrastructure of experimental poetry in the early 1990s.
The magazine’s intimacy was part of its meaning. It did not attempt to survey the field or borrow authority from already established poets; it gave a developing circle of writers a place to recognize, challenge, and address one another. A later scholarly account calls it an important outlet and common point of reference for this group, arguing that such little magazines did more than document a community: they helped bring that community into existence.
The project continued in another form in 1997, when Moxley and Steve Evans produced the Impercipient Lecture Series, a monthly pamphlet devoted to poetics, criticism, and literary history. The eight issues preserved here capture the earlier, more informal phase: a poetry culture being assembled through friendship, argument, inexpensive reproduction, and the circulation of work that had not yet found a larger public.