1: Gender and Editing
Editors' Note: Frameworks
Relation: Perhaps a good starting point would be to discuss my apprehension about editing. I am uncomfortable with the idea of the editor as arbiter of good taste, or as the (in)visible navigator/sculptor of a final packaged product. Journals rarely seem to openly admit the presence of personal ideology behind their pages. And when they do, the “personalized” frame seems to stifle and alter the work by mashing it into an overly-prescribed space. We all change what we read in the very act of reading; however, editing forces an external median strip between the substance of the original and what it will become. Such mediation can create a powerfully dialogic space; it can also create a “culinary” space that limits the possibilities in the act of reading. The Chain project is an attempt to investigate the (im)possibility of an unmediated reception, the (im)possibility of detaching a writing from its presentational /ideological form.
Relation: I edited an anthology earlier in the year and at the end of that, despite the fact that I spent a year reading for it and thinking about the politics of representation in its construction, the final product left me alienated and confused. This confusion was not predicated on a lack of faith in the authors represented in the collection, but on the ability of any collection to make claims of authority or finality or even of representation (which anthologies claim by their very definition). While I still don’t feel we’ve escaped authority’s claims in this format, I feel farther away from the product, detached as it were, from my claims.
Part One: Editorial Forum
Production: It is impossible to make a frameless frame (although that is the vision from which this project derived). We have instead begun the journal with a forum that takes a look at how and why journals are created and in what ways questions of gender have informed those decisions. It sounds absurd to edit a journal that’s about the editing of journals—a nightmare of self-reflexivity—and yet it is a way of creating a body that shows its own skeleton. Instead of putting together a collection that claims over and over the ability of the editor to know and define (“hey! great outfit!”), we wanted to be able to say “this made itself and here is whats it’s made of; it is just a part of what continues.” This is not to say that there aren’t editors out there rejecting the role of objective talent scout—in fact there are many editors who will quickly admit that their personal taste is responsible for what they publish—but does that release the work from questioning the taste that lead to its appearance? What are the implications behind making a personal taste public? Why not simply enjoy that taste (or idea) in a more private way? The manner in which taste presents itself in the public sphere is something always worth examining.
[Brecht used a half-curtain in his performances so that you knew the scene was over, but you could see the scene being changed. No magic, no Hollywood, no illusions that there is such a thing as seamlessness, that there’s an appropriate time to suspend your disbelief. In creating the structure that we have for Chain, we’re attempting an editorial equivalent of the half-curtain.]
Chain does not escape the problem of private concerns displaying themselves publicly (not that any presentation could escape this problem), as is evident from the journal’s structure, as well as our decision to include only women writers in the journal. This was not an easy decision; we are both aware of the difficulties of talking about gender as in any way other than constructed. To start a gender-centered forum is in some ways reinstating problematic narratives of gender. The spectre of separatism looms large. Our frame has separated out (in the manner that elements are distilled out from a liquid concentrate) an issue (gender and editing) that is discursive. The inter-connection between creative word and issue orientation leads to uneasy relations. It necessitates statements which seem like they are meant to stand eternal—a permanent lens.
Women who edit hold a particular place in an established discourse of authority Whether they think about it or not, they must evaluate their stance in relation to that realm. Perhaps to ignore that factor is in itself a form of subversion—it’s a way of maintaining a frame that refuses to participate in unpleasant histories.
It is ironic that in order for dialogue to take place, conversational limits must be set. We chose the limit of gender. A conversation that takes place in print, as opposed to verbally, insists on an even further set of boundaries. Many of the elements that feed verbal scenes (body language, voice tone, immediacy, constant revision) are completely absent. However, any printed text is a gesture toward conversation; it’s a presentation that invites response. We’re trying to create a forum that takes that invitation seriously, that is not just going through the motions of what it means to instigate response; it requires continuation.
We did not succeed in creating a form by which the journal could spontaneously combust. Our initial solicitation of both editors and poets overly-determined the membership of these pages’ community, another example of how conversation is contingent on a restrictive foundation. Conversations must take place in a locale, and not everyone can exist at one single moment in one locale—although ideally, all voices would have an opportunity to enter the room and make the changes they deemed necessary to their concerns. Our concerns included the desire for more communication with women writers than our current locale allows for.
Part Two: Chain Letters
Production: While Chain is an attempt at a conversational journal, any editor must make choices. Our choices were of format We wanted somehow to create a journal free of the constrictions and assumptions of “taste.” But at the same time we wanted the journal to have a center. Our particular compromise is the mix of the chain letter format where we chose, more on the basis of geographical location than anything else, a number of poets to start chains; those poets in turn decided who to send their poem to for response, who then sent their poem on, etc. The intent of our format was to open up the journal to other writers whose work we might notknow. It has been successful at this. It is not a completely open-ended rejection of editorial prerogative such as the “assembling projects” that Liz Was mentions in the “Small Press Forum” [see Transcript of Small Press Panel], but rather someplace in between.
Interjection: I disagree with the idea that we’ve been “successful” at opening up the journal to unfamiliar voices. Or at least it hasn’t happened to the degree that we had hoped for when we came up with the concept. Writers we were less familiar with were more hesitant to respond. Or writers whom we were depending on to introduce us to new poets ignored our request for work in the way that many of us ignore the requests made by actual chain letters. Any suggestions on how to get beyond this stumbling block would be much appreciated . . .
WITH LOVE ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE. THIS PAPER HAS BEEN SENT TO YOU FOR GOOD LUCK. THE ORIGINAL IS IN NEW ENGLAND. IT HAS BEEN AROUND THE WORLD NINE TIMES. THE LUCK HAS BEEN SENT TO YOU. YOU WILL RECEIVE GOOD LUCK WITHIN FOUR DAYS OF RECEIVING THIS LETTER, PROVIDED IN TURN YOU SENT IT ON. THIS IS NO JOKE.
. . . How can the poems inside a structure activate their own juxtapositions, their own presentational form? How can they lose the slick editorial veneer of self-containment and become interactive? In Chain we conceived of an arbitrary spiral that spins loosely out from the work to include another—arbitrary in that a spiral’s geometry is a fixed set of coordinates moving in a direction, but the nature of those coordinates is unknown. There is certainly a framework to create the substance’s posture/being, but a framework of inclusion. The spiral is a curling around, the motion of the arm winding in, as opposed to fingers plucking and sorting . . . what geometric form would that be? Points on a line? The spiral is a figure without telos really, for its expansion outward is continuous, only momentarily frozen by the fact of its publication.
Linked forms are places for conversation, for a (to some extent) non-hierarchical development to occur. Such development is almost always missing from editorial considerations.
Chain letters are acts of will; they are propelled by desire for luck, desire for money, fear. We might not know where they originate. We might not know where they end up. They are disposable—but with an edge. They dredge up a side of you, the side that thinks “but what if I don’t. . . . ” and you can’t place your resentment of having to make a decision on any one particular subject: a consequence of relation. This is a chain after all, a unit consisting of many, each part of equal importance, each part leading to this moment where all is contingent on your response. Chain attempts to take this device in a further direction. The receiver alters the nature of the chain as it is propelled forward (by desire for luck? by desire for money? by fear?). And the chain’s course is tracked, the map of its passage marked in book format.
YOU WILL RECEIVE GOOD LUCK IN THE MAIL. SEND NO MONEY, AS FAITH HAS NO PRICE. DO NOT KEEP THIS LETTER. IT MUST LEAVE YOUR HANDS WITHIN 96 HOURS. AN R.A.F. OFFICER RECEIVED $170,000. JOE ELLIOT RECEIVED $40,000 AND LOST IT BECAUSE HE BROKE THE CHAIN. WHILE IN THE PHILLIPINES, GEORGE WELCH LOST HIS WIFE 51 DAYS AFTER RECEIVING THE LETTER. HE FAILED TO CIRCULATE THE LETTER.
The chain letter is a skewed form of communication. But once it is out there, it is up to each receiver to determine its fate.
Is this like reading?
DYLAN FAIRCHILD RECEIVED THE LETTER, AND NOT BELIEVING, HE THREW THE LETTER AWAY. NINE DAYS LATER HE DIED.
