In the Anteroom

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Disch, Thomas M

EVERY YEAR AFTER THE CITY'S MARATHON, the New York Times publishes a special section giving the names of all the official participants who lasted till the finish line. Never to have had one's name appear in that list, if one is a long-term resident of the City, is tantamount to an admission of illiteracy or virginity. I admit to having shirked that duty to Nike, Goddess of Fitness, myself, and I blush for it. Too late now, arthritic and overweight, to make amends.

In the short corridor of tatty paperbacks and old magazines leading to my downstairs bathroom, there is another such compilation (albeit only conceptual) of honorable contenders, not as official as the list in the Times. It is an honor roll of everyone in the last half-century who's published a poem in one of the little magazines that form a solid wall of the snows of yesteryear. Poets of World War II vintage in Partisan Review, old friends in John Sladek's ephemeral Ronald Reagan and now venerable beatniks in Ed Sander's Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. They make for ideal bathtub browsing and a sobering reminder of how art and artists' reputations are not necessarily all that long. If all the poets in all those old magazines were set down in one Parnassian table of contents it would be at least as long as the list of the year's runners. And to have appeared on that list, at least once in your life, would be no less a distinction than to have run the Marathon.

That doesn't mean, of course, that to have once published a poem makes one a fine poet, or that poem a work to be cherished. But it does entitle one to mumble, along with Brando, "I coulda been a contender." It means that in at least the year that issue appeared one had written a poem someone had thought enough of to print for other people to read. For a writer just starting out that first acceptance is a momentous event, especially if it has been preceded by a long succession of notes saying (in the words of The Editors of The New Yorker) "We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it." To which there can be no suitable reply short of self-immolation, or else living so very well and becoming so rich and so famous that at last The New Yorker must publish you for the sake of its own circulation. An impossible dream, you say? Not if you are Stephen King.

The rest of us who are not Stephen King must scale our ambitions down to the mid-range of the merely human that Pope recommends. If not The New Yorker then Shenandoah; if not Shenandoah then Poetry Northwest; if not Poetry Northwest then kayak. And if not an acceptance at one of those venues then at least a note ampler and more humane in tone than "Sorry, wrong number."

Such a note, infamously, was the reward of those who, back in the sixties, had their poems rejected by George Hitchcock, the editor of kayak. I had a whole sheaf of them at one time, but my archival good intentions did not keep pace with the ever-lengthening paper trail of old bank records, phone bills, to-do lists, and Christmas cards. What a blessing then to find almost a dozen of those classic rejection slips collected in One-Man Boat: The George Hitchcock Reader.1 This one, for instance, a child pinned down by a ravening wolf, his brother standing beside them with an ax poised in the air. A whole cliff-hanger in one vintage steel engraving. And the caption below this harrowing scene: "Sorry, but the editors of kayak feel that your submission is not quite what we need this season. Thanks anyway." At last, the inner truth of all rejection slips. Sometimes, the note would come with a few words of bland encouragement-"Interesting" or "Reminds me of BIy!"-but the essential truth lay in the juxtaposition of a scene of horrendous malevolence with some soul-crushing editorial bromide. Hitchcock comments on the matter: "It was good for a laugh although some people were terribly insulted. But the ones who are terribly insulted you wouldn't want in the magazine anyway."

Not only (alas) do I have none of those great rejection slips, but my copies of kayak are not there on the shelves of the bathroom hallway. I have only my fond memories faded almost to extinction. I remember the size, the stapled binding, the texture and heft of the paper, the cover just a step up from a plain brown wrapper, the dollar price-tag, and a general sense that the poetry had a flavor of the West Coast. The contributors' list that Philip Levine reels off in his foreword includes John Haines, Margaret Atwood, Charles Simic, James Täte, Steven Dunn, Mark Doty, etc.-to cite only poets whom Levine first read in kayak. The list of its "established" contributors includes almost every American A-menu poet of the uncooked variety, formal poetry being then (kayak was founded in 1964) at its nadir. Hitchcock's taste was a lot like Bly's (then editing The Sixties), favoring a blanched surrealism, flecked, in kayak's pages, with bursts of existential angst, like a Pollock painting.