Charles Simic had a hell of a day yes­ter­day. Not only was he named Poet Lau­re­ate, an hon­orary post that includes a $35,000/year stipend, but he was also announced as this year’s winner of the Acad­emy of Amer­i­can Poets Wal­lace Stevens Award, which brings with it a some­what more sub­stan­tial $100,000 prize.

It wasn’t until I read the NYT arti­cle announc­ing Simic’s lau­re­ate­ship that I learned Simic’s first poems were pub­lished in Chicago Review when he was 21. We went back yes­ter­day to find the issue, from Winter 1959, and while I was look­ing it over, it struck me: that issue should never have been published.

That’s no dig at Simic. It is, rather, a recog­ni­tion that that Winter 1959 issue of CR was really the second Winter 1959 issue that had been pre­pared for pub­li­ca­tion. The first was sup­pressed by the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago in a cen­sor­ship scan­dal; when the con­tents of that issue even­tu­ally saw the light of day, they did so only under a new title.

The story starts in 1958. [Read more]

My open (and ter­ri­bly earnest) letter in response to some of David Baratier’s com­ments on the Buf­falo POET­ICS list (which are archived here):

Since no one’s sprint­ing to our defense, I hope I can be for­given for offer­ing a brief response to David Baratier’s com­ments on recent issues of Chicago Review. (Though I write as a co-​editor of the mag­a­zine, I don’t pre­sume to speak for my fellow edi­tors and staff mem­bers. The mag­a­zine is too small, too pre­car­i­ously assem­bled to tol­er­ate a party line.)

I’d like to leave Mr. Baratier’s con­cerns about the Dorn issue to the side, since I wasn’t at the mag­a­zine then and can’t speak for Eirik, except to say his deep knowl­edge of and seri­ous pas­sion for Dorn’s work hardly qual­i­fies him as a “dabbler.” And I can’t speak to whether our “entire tone has went to silence” or the poetry we pub­lish “promotes inaction.” It’s true that we haven’t had any fan let­ters from the bar­ri­cades, but I’m not sure that set­tles the case. For most people on this planet, the fact that we pay as much atten­tion to poetry as we do would count as evi­dence for charge that we’re “out of step with the needs of the cur­rent age.”
[Read more]

Photos from the April 6 launch party for the new Chicago Review British Poetry Issue. Keston Suther­land, Peter Manson, and Andrea Brady (all fea­tured, with Chris Goode, in the new issue) read at Elas­tic Arts Space.