[New-Poetry] Fwd: Contemporary Poetry Review Relaunches!

Fri Nov 5 13:58:49 EDT 2010

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From: Contemporary Poetry Review <cpreview at aol.com>
To: jforjames at aol.com
Sent: Fri, Nov 5, 2010 1:51 pm
Subject: Contemporary Poetry Review Relaunches!

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Contemporary Poetry Review
Relaunches!

ERNEST HILBERT'S FAREWELL ADDRESS

One of several enticements of the internet for a literary magazine, as for any enterprise, is the ease with which information may be conveyed, stored, and distributed. The era that saw pallets of magazines amassed in warehouses -- or, in the case of one magazine I edited, in the copy room at the law office of its publisher -- is nearing its end (another magazine I edited suffered the loss of nearly its entire first issue when it was summarily incinerated by workmen, who deemed the amount of space it absorbed, in otherwise-unused lockers, intolerable). Contemporary Poetry Review founder and publisher Garrick Davis outlined the case succinctly in his second mission statement:

The cost to produce, and therefore to purchase, a little magazine is exorbitant-it usually carries a price equal to a paperback book. Possessing a tiny readership, the little magazine cannot attract advertisers. Lacking advertisers, it cannot offset the costs of production. With no profit margin to encourage its sale and distribution, every issue of the little magazine begins its life stillborn as a commercial enterprise. 

We have since discovered that the world of online publishing is not entirely devoid of hazards. It harbors its own gremlins. Buggy servers, hard-to-reach programmers, and limited budgets slowly ground the magazine to a temporary, but entirely unavoidable, halt earlier this year. In its twelfth year of publication, the Contemporary Poetry Review dedicated much of its energies to an upgrade and has now emerged from its chrysalis in superior form. 

Five years is a long time, even if it is only a blip on the ever-scrolling screen of literary history. Having devoted a full half decade ministering the needs of the magazine -- editing, editorializing, and chasing after all manner of loose ends -- I feel I deserve some time to relax and pursue allied projects, so I now step down as editor. I will remain mixed up with the magazine, of course, and, with luck, I may even locate the energy to begin writing again myself (as evidenced by my essay on John Ashbery in an upcoming issue). 

In my time as editor I have parried furious, often fanatical, correspondence, gained at least one stalker, and somehow found time to marshal a great number of reviews through press, sometimes from the merest germ of an idea. The position provided countless alarms, amusements, and diversions. Risks were rewarded. Parties were thrown, reputations challenged, ills addressed, obscurer talents hailed, cars impounded. I enjoyed interviewing a number of lively subjects, among them W.D. Snodgrass, Franz Wright, and Erica Dawson. I instituted a series of short essays focused on individual poems, "CPR Classic Readings," which yielded close readings of poems by Louis MacNeice, Yeats, Donald Davie, and Hart Crane. I arranged several special issues devoted to individual poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Louis MacNeice, X. J. Kennedy, Tom Disch, and Philip Larkin. I applied considerable energy to recruiting new critics, a group that includes such talents as Hannah Brooks-Motl, Andrew Goodspeed, Mariana Housková, Maria Johnston, Adam Kirsch, Lorne Mooke, Rebecca Porte, and Kathleen Rooney. 

Thus my farewell address. I will not warn against poetry-industrial complexes, fulminate against the party system (so rankly evident in much poetry culture), or abjure privileged monopolies. I've said enough already. The Contemporary Poetry Review will, no doubt, continue to prod, provoke, uncover, analyze, and antagonize as it has these past twelve years. So I say: Here's to all tomorrow's parties. Many thanks for reading, and welcome to CPR 2.0. Enjoy! 

BUY THE NEW BOOK BY CONTEMPORARY POETRY REVIEW FOUNDER AND PUBLISHER GARRICK DAVIS: TERMINAL DIAGRAMS, AVAILABLE NOW FROM OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

Buy it here. 

"These poems are made of steel." - Willis Barnstone 

"These are formally elegant poems on subjects that are inelegant and indeed chaotic and mad. That juxtaposition gives [these] poems an enormous leverage and credence and conviction." - Sherod Santos, author of The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems

Garrick Davis's Terminal Diagrams may have been inspired by the illustrated maps in airport lounges, or perhaps they are the blueprints of the Apocalypse, with their subjects and objects representing the bitter fruits of either some future nightmare or the present world. Regardless, their vision is so bleak and unsparing, only a few will be able to savor them. Here, the art of poetry has been mechanized just as the world has been mechanized. Whether his subject is a car accident on the freeways of Los Angeles or the Book of Revelation transmitted by television, Davis's stanzas conjure a kind of futuristic noir. In poem after poem, he examines the artistic possibilities of the machine, and its alterations of human experience, with a modern spirit that -- as Baudelaire defined it -- has embraced "the sublimity and monstrousness of something new." 

Garrick Davis is the founding editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review, the largest online archive of poetry criticism in the world (cprw.com). His poetry and criticism have appeared in the New Criterion, Verse, the Weekly Standard, McSweeney's, and the New York Sun. He also edited Child of the Ocmulgee: the Selected Poems of Freda Quenneville. He is the literature specialist of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington.

Help 
the CPR

Please remember all the weary critics out there sweating over their reviews, counting on payment for their taxing and otherwise thankless work. Consider a tax-deductible contribution to the Contemporary Poetry Review.

Your contribution helps to sustain the most energetic independent voices in poetry criticism today. 

Remember: They have the numbers; we the heights. Please help us today if you can. 

The Contemporary Poetry Review is a program of the American Poetry Fund, a charitable organization with 501(c)(3) status. Please make checks payable to the American Poetry Fund. 
Contemporary Poetry Review
PO Box 5222
Arlington, VA 22205     
USA     

With your help, we will continue to resuscitate the vital art of poetry criticism.  

FORMER CPR EDITOR ERNEST HILBERT INVITES YOU TO SEVERAL UPCOMING READINGS 

Stop by and say hi!

Sunday, November 7th, 2PM
Ernest Hilbert reads with Nicholas Friedman
Carmine Street Metrics
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY 10012-2802

 ***

Thursday, November 11th, 7PM
Ernest Hilbert reads with Bill Coyle, Nora Delany, and Daniel Pritchard
Hosted by Zachary Bos
Sponsored by the Boston Poetry Union
Pierre Menard Gallery
10 Arrow Street
Harvard Square
Cambridge, MA 02138
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
WINE WILL BE PROVIDED

 ***

Sunday December 5th, 2-4PM
Ernest Hilbert reads with Bill Coyle, Anna Evans, April Lindner, James Matthew Wilson, Alfred Nicol and David Yezzi, hosted by Michael Peich and Christine Yurick.
Fourth Annual Victory Collaborative: Celebrating poetry and beer, sponsored by Think Journal
Victory Brewing Company, 420 Acorn Lane, Downingtown, PA 19335

 ***

Monday, February 7th, 2011, 6:30PM
Ernest Hilbert reads with Nick Moudry
Philadelphia Free Library Monday Poets Reading Series
Skyline Room of the Philadelphia Central Library, 1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia, 19103
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

CPR editor Ernest Hilbert's debut collection is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and finer bookstores. 

Latest Praise for Sixty Sonnets 

Ernest Hilbert's Sixty Sonnets is exactly what its title suggests -- and thus it's a performance as much as a book of poems, showy and spectacular. From the brisk noir of "She Remembers How They Fled from the Liquor Store Robbery in New Mexico" to the ironic call-and-response of "Fortunate Ones" to the elegiac fatalism of "White Noise" Hilbert takes the reader on a bravura run through seemingly every variation of tone and style that the sonnet can contain. It's a craftsman's book, a revival of form best summed up by the opening lines of "Song": "A song for those who learn forgotten, slow / Skills, crafts submerged long past by massed commerce."

- Levi Stahl, poetry editor, Quarterly Conversation

[Sixty Sonnets] delivers the full range of human types and stories, and nearly the whole breadth of what the sonnet can do. . . . We might see Hilbert as being God in these poems -- as taking the all-gathering view of the merciful God who has room for all these lost ones, right along with the desperate fugitives, retired literary critics, crime victims, lovers, and godfathers. The poet as indwelling creator spirit? It fits for Hilbert: poet, from poietes, maker.

-    Rattle

Hilbert is one of our best rhymers since Robert Frost, and his poems have been compared by superb poets to those of John Berryman and Robert Lowell. We haven't had a poetry like his -- both seriously tough-minded and wryly self-chiding -- to enjoy and mull over for a long time. 

-    Alice Quinn, Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America           

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