In an essay called “Of Living Belfry and Rampart: On American Literary Magazines Since 1950” Michael Anania describes an official Soviet literary delegation’s visit to the offices of Swallow Press in the early 1970s. When the dour apparatchiks came across an immense library of back issues of Toothpick, Floating Bear, Goliards and other obscure magazines, the inevitable questions were asked: “What are these things?” “How can there be so many?” “Do they all have many readers?” and, unspoken but hovering behind the other questions, the big one, the specter still haunting American poetry: Does anyone really need another poetry magazine?

My own suspicion is that what we really need is another Percy Shelley, someone to come along and write a defense, not of poetry, but of the publishing of poetry. But until such a figure appears to set the hearts of editors at ease, each must answer for him- or herself the question: Why another poetry magazine? Or, more precisely, Why this poetry magazine?

There are two reasons for publishing the magazine you have before you. Firstly, by making a strong commitment to writing from beyond the borders of the United States, to do as much as possible to wedge a few of the best poems written elsewhere into American consciousness, for the greater benefit of all concerned. This commitment means publishing poetry in translation, but also poetry in English from the UK and all those parts of the world where the English language has taken root. American ignorance of poetry in other languages is merely shocking; American ignorance of the world’s other English-language poetries is unforgivable. This issue contains Polish, Russian, Swedish and English poetry, as well as work by American poets, and future issues will continue to look abroad, with special issues on Sweden and Scotland/Wales in the works for 1999. The commitment to poetry from elsewhere also means publishing essays that help place this poetry in the local contexts which give it meaning: Piotr Parlej’s essay on the place of Adam Zagajewski in Polish poetry is the first such essay to appear in Samizdat.

The second reason for this magazine stems from the current state of American poetry, a state well described by Alan Shapiro when he writes that

the recent debate if not the recent practice of American poetry does seem to divide itself roughly into two opposing aesthetic camps: one based in the lyric of subjective life, the other in the skepticism of the intellect … if this dichotomy simplifies too much, it’s useful nonetheless in helping us distinguish those poets, who do in fact conform too neatly to one camp or another, from those who resist identification with either extreme, whose ambition and achievement are precisely to bring together and integrate what in the work of their contemporaries is found mostly in isolation.

Shapiro is describing the awkward position of those poets whose work is neither workshop poetry nor LANGUAGE poetry, who belong neither to the establishment nor the counter-establishment, who find their poetic home in neither Iowa City nor in Buffalo. It is primarily these American poets that Samizdat seeks out, for the same reason that it seeks out poetry from outside the US: to do as much as possible to wedge a few of the most interesting poems into American consciousness.

I notice, looking at the present issue, that a map locating the contributors would look a bit like a United Airlines route map: centered on Chicago with lines stretching out to other parts of the country and to points around the world. The centrality of Chicago and environs is, to some degree, a function of the magazine’s location in metro Chicago, but it is also, I think, reflective of the way that the cultural climate of Chicago has fostered poets without pressuring them to conform too closely to the establishment or the counter-establishment. It is in the interstices between orthodoxies that poetry finds innovation and life, and this is why Chicago has become one of the good places for poetry.

I’m not sure that all this would satisfy the Writer’s Union apparatchiks from Anania’s essay, but no one is asking them to judge Samizdat. The person whose opinion matters is you. Samizdat comes out three times a year, and subscriptions are $10.