Matters
December, 2011
Isn't it deliciously exhausting to be a literary publisher today? Months go by and issues work their way to the surface. Are they clawing their way outward? Might they push through your screen? The tickle of it, the tug and persistent bar humming its tune over and over. Memento mondo. Is that Joy or are you just happy to text me? Strands of ideas, opinions, wakeful urgentings, middle-of-night shadowplay. It's going on all the time, this labour of raising spaces for poetry conversation.
On behalf of all of us here at InfluencySalon.ca, I am thrilled to offer for your reading pleasure Issue 4 of InfluencySalon magazine, entitled "Giving It Up," co-edited by the radically contemplative and attentive team of Paula Eisenstein, Joan Guenther and Liz Howard. This issue takes as its triple-headed focus books of poetry that were discussed and interrelated during the Influency Salon session of Spring 2010.
Along with our brilliant feature essays by John Barton, Susan Holbrook and Jacob McArthur Mooney, we are proud to present a long slate of current Measurists. These critics, some of whom are publishing responses for the first time, offer unique and thought-provoking perspectives on books of poetry that deserve to be taken up from multiple angles and to incite conversational plurality. We wish to sincerely thank all of these writers for their generosity and engagement: David Alderson, Siona Drummond, Eric Foley, Margot Lettner, Ben Nolan, Deena Shaffer, John Stout, Amy Taylor, and Ruth Zuchter.
For enthralling Outflow texts, we are grateful to Sonja Greckol, Margot Lettner and Shannon Maguire.
I offer special thanks to Ralph Kolewe for his audio excursions with our featured poets, his ubercapable and unflappable production expertise, his own contributions as Influency Salonist, and that undercurrent of deep caring about poetics he brings to all of his gestures here.
As we go live with Issue 4, several other texts in our other sections arrive in company. Notably we appreciate the sensuous poem sequence by Stefhany Fabrizi, which appears here in relationship with one of Ralph Kolewe's wonderful "Frames." Julie Joosten has contributed a "Like" on Cabinet Magazine, and Brandy Ryan's unique suitably elliptical "Taste" on [and of] Lise Downe's new poetry collection This Way joins our reviews section.
InfluencySalon.ca is a vision of poetry culture that foments among a group of us; my thanks to all the founding and current editors of this project and especially to the newer contributors who are bringing fuel and inquiry to this generating apparatus.
Our most resonant, inexhaustible thanks we save for the three poets whose work has inspired us all to read a little more closely, to consider and reconsider our assumptions about poetic form and lyric effect: Exponential thanks, then, go to Susan Holbrook, Gregory Betts and Ruth Roach Pierson for sharing their work on the page, in the Influency Salon classroom, and through their voices for our audio segments. Additional thanks to the publishers and editors of these beautiful, surprising books of poetry. For Pierson's Aide-Mémoire, gratitude to BuschekBooks; For Betts's The Others Raised in Me, we thank Pedlar Press; For Holbrook's Joy is So Exhausting, perpetual-refill kudos to Coach House Books.
—Margaret Christakos
Previously:
April 18, 2010
Our first three issues will be a kick-start triumvirate, appearing here in quick succession. Today you’re finding "Issue 1: Reading From the Inside" on our home page, exploring books by M. NourbeSe Philip, Sina Queyras and Phil Hall. in mid-May "Issue 2: Fruitful Disorder" appears, focusing on books by Michael Boughn, Meredith Quartermain and Jordan Scott, followed in early September by "Issue 3: From/Of/To," featuring books by Kate Eichhorn, Ronna Bloom and Trish Salah. These three inaugural issues will set this vivid poetry salon’s commitment firmly at your wrists. Poetry matters. To us, to you, to cities, to air, to culture.
Influency Salon is an online magazine for the reception and distribution of poetry thinking — reading diverse works of poetry, conversing about them, and measuring their ways and means, forms and motives. Via page and ear, our editors and contributors listen deeply and care persistently. We figure how the work matters. We expect a conversation about poetry to be public, present, and relevant. We want to gather in the room of poetry, and talk our heads off.
Get over here, will you? And tell others to wander this way, toward poetry.
