“Rough and sexy might be our “house style,” but I see these aspects as being a fallout of just well-written, honest poems. We do not deliberately select poems on this basis, but we are certainly not afraid to print them either.” —Raymond Hammond
.
.
NYQ 64 Cover Art: “With the Wind,” 20 x 24″ photograph on canvas, by Anderson Zaca, 2004. http://www.andersonzaca.com.
.
Since taking over as editor of The New York Quarterly in 2002, Raymond Hammond has upheld that publication’s reputation as one of the most exciting poetry journals in America. A poet himself, he has made occasional contributions to the magazine in both verse and prose, samples of which can be found on his personal website. In an era when most writers are ensconced in academia, Hammond keeps a far more interesting day job as a security officer at the Statue of Liberty. In both capacities, he is entrusted with safeguarding a true New York institution.
.
Readers of the Quarterly will not be surprised to learn that Hammond’s personal tastes and views are eclectic, occasionally edgy, and always engaging. In an extended recent interview with The Abbeville Manual of Style, he discussed everything from literature, the visual arts, and music to the business side of poetry and why poets can still be (as Shelley claimed) “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
.
AMoS: You replaced NYQ’s founding editor, the late William Packard, in 2002. How did you feel about taking over this role and was the transition difficult at all?
RH: The transition has been and still is in many ways difficult for various reasons. And we were somewhat prepared for this. In 1998 after his stroke, Bill had said that he had begun to think about his mortality and asked me if I would assume control should anything happen to him as well as serve as his literary executor. So I had wrestled through the “should I, shouldn’t I?” at that time. I was shocked when he originally asked, and it took me a while to get back to him. I finally decided that I should simply trust the fact that he believed in me and had asked me. Then in November of 2002 Bill was found in his apartment by our then managing editor, Helen Hulskamp, seated in his wheelchair, his writing notebook open, hand down by his side with his pen just below his hand on the floor. I immediately took the reins and began making funeral arrangements, contacting people, etc. I had to. There was no one else to do it, and many legal decisions needed to be made that very day. And it has been a struggle ever since. We still are not where I want us to be, but I feel confident that we will be in the near future.
And underneath the daily struggles of just operating the magazine, from fitting the magazine in between my law enforcement job at the Statue of Liberty to large philosophical and corporate decisions, such as reconstituting the board, there has always been the undercurrent of having lost a father. I lost my real father a number of years before Bill passed on, and in many ways I had come to see Bill as a father figure, as I believe most people did who came into his tutelage, but deep under the arranging and decisions and legal meanderings and fighting to keep the magazine alive, has always been his presence and his voice. I strive every day to stay true to what I was taught and to honor his memory in every decision I make regarding the magazine. This is especially important in the editorial voice of the magazine. Having studied under him for as many years as I had, the editorial voice of the magazine was somewhat my voice, but there is still an element of me in every decision as well, and I have to recognize and accept that, but ultimately, that is the most important aspect of the transition, maintaining a closeness to that voice while embracing my own in the process.
AMoS: As the editor of a poetry journal you presumably strive to be eclectic in your selections, but have your readers (or you) ever sensed a New York Quarterly “house style”? If so, how would you define it?
RH: I like to define the “house style” as hyper-eclectic or I sometimes say intense, to define not only the range of styles, but the severity of the poems. And I hope above hope that this is not just a hope as an editor, but a reality, and I trust that it truly does describe the magazine. We have readings every third Monday at Cornelia Street Café in NYC and I am consistently and pleasantly surprised at each reading by how representative it feels of the magazine. We have three equally billed readers and there can certainly be a spoken word poet right before a somber academic poet, or a language poet billed the same night as a concrete poet, and what never ceases to amaze me is that certain crowds will show up for each poet of the evening and it never fails that the crowds seem to enjoy every poet and mingle well. That is how I like to think of the magazine.
I think that some people would say that since Bill published a great deal of Bukowski, and there have always seemingly been a great deal of “sex poems” in each issue, that rough and sexy might be our “house style,” but I see these aspects as being a fallout of just well-written, honest poems. We do not deliberately select poems on this basis, but we are certainly not afraid to print them either.
AMoS: You recently launched http://www.nyqpoets.net as a companion to NYQ’s main site. Can you explain the concept behind this site and how it benefits both your readers and your contributing authors?
RH: I am very proud of our site, nyqpoets.net, which has grown tremendously since its launching back in December of 2007. The basic structure of the site is that it is built around a complete index of the magazine. The reader may go on the site and type in all or part of a poem’s title and find the author and issue; they may also go on and find every issue in which a favorite poet has appeared. Researchers can go in and get complete listings of poems either by title or issue number for a poet they are researching. Now this is well and good and many magazines have indexes online, but I am very excited about this site for the two other general aspects that make it more unique.
The first enhanced aspect of the site is for both the poet and the reader. The poet can go into their control panel and expand the page that displays the index results into a mini-webpage if they so desire. They can add announcements for readings, books, etc.; they may display a photo of themselves and then may add up to 9 other photos of their liking to a photo gallery. The photo gallery feature was recently added in response to a number of our poets who are also visual artists and also to better accommodate the visual artist that we feature on our covers. The poet can also post an extended biography, link to up to fifteen additional sites, including video widgets; list every poem they have ever published with links to the poem, if it is displayed online, or the magazine, or both; and the coup d’état of the site is that each poet or artist can list all of their books for sale with links to where they may be purchased, and even post interior views of the copyright page, the back matter or a sample poem in our “peek inside” function. This last area was developed out of recognizing that most poets have books for sale through many independent venues. On their nyqpoets.net page they can collect all of their books for sale in one place and direct the reader to where the books may be purchased. We can even take money for the poet in consignment sales if they have no other means of selling the books.
The second aspect of the site is for the poet and the magazine. The other main area of the control panel for the poet is designed for the poet to interact with the magazine. They may submit online, accept their terms for publication online, submit the poem’s digital file for publication, put their contributor note (and maintain that contributor note as current right up to press time), as well as proof their galleys for the next issue in which they will be appearing.
So I hope that nyqpoets.net truly lives up to its name. It is all about our poets: for the poet to post about themselves and their work, for the reader to find out about their favorite poets, and for the poet to interact with the magazine.
AMoS: There is a third NYQ-affiliated site: http://www.poetscraft.com. What can readers expect to find there?
RH: Poetscraft was a site that I developed a number of years ago to be an ancillary site to our more professional nyquarterly.org site. I wanted to put all of Bill’s teaching handouts online for free download, but our hosting package at the time for nyquarterly.org did not have the bandwidth to support so many large .pdf files. So I found a hosting package that would support it and built the site myself to provide those handouts as well as other functions of a magazine, such as a massive database of links to other magazines, schools and just about anything poetry-related. We also have items for purchase, such as mugs and t-shirts. It did house an individual page for each poet to list their books for sale with links to where their books could be purchased, but we have since collapsed this function into the nyqpoets.net site.
AMoS: There is a long history of poets with a deep interest in the visual arts, including some (Blake, D.G. Rossetti) who have succeeded admirably at both crafts. Why do you think this connection is as strong as it is? Why do there seem to be more great poet/artists than, say, great poet/musicians (especially when, given the origins of poetry, one might expect more of the latter)?
Immediately I am reminded of Pound’s trifecta of good literature: phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia; sight, sound and sense. Poetry is the nexus of the three.
Phanopoeia, or sight, is the visual aspect of poetry, and poetry is not poetry without successful imagery of some form or another. I think that artists like Blake and Rossetti, and to this list I would immediately add Kenneth Patchen and many more, are drawn to the imagery, the visual aspect of the poem. Poetry provides a different expansion of the visual image—it does not replace, by any stretch of the imagination, art—but it does provide a completely different investigation or expression of the image in a unique way, and I think that the possibility of adding the interplay of visual with other elements such as sound and sense, is what interests many visual artists.
In poetry, melopoeia is an equally important aspect of the trifecta. I am not sure that there aren’t as many poet/musicians as there are poet/artists. Possibly “high school garage band” experiences are too common to be noticed as much as artwork having been produced. Many poets have beginnings in both art and music. I know in my own experience that in high school I both won photography awards and played in a garage band, then later in life I won more photography awards and was a member of the American Federation of Musicians, Local 165 and played professionally. And I know that this story of coming to poetry is not unique. I often meet people who come to poetry after exploring both music and the visual arts. I do think that the musical aspect of poetry, the melody, the melopoeia, draws a number of musicians, for example Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and even more contemporary musical artists such as Nas, all of whom could be considered poets in their own right.
And since I mentioned a trifecta, why not round the discussion out with logopoeia, which is a little harder to nail down, the sense of it all, but for our purposes here let’s use dramatic arts. Many actors also find their way to poetry, bringing with them a sense of human interaction and investigation to enhance their words. In the history of the magazine we have published many poet/actors such as Michael Moriarty and in our most recent issues we have published both Amber Tamblyn and Grace Zabriskie, who, I might add, is not only a terrific poet/actor, but is a fabulous visual artist as well.
Now let me address one more aspect of this question, a distinction I did not bother to draw before: I do not really see poetry as being a medium in a discussion such as this, I see it more as a sensibility. Writing is a medium, just like painting or sculpting, or singing, but it is my heartfelt belief that poetry is found in the heart of all the artistic mediums. That a painter finds the poetry in their painting, a singer the poetry in their voice and this is the reason that so many of the lines are blurred and you can have poet/anything. These artists live that poetic sensibility in whatever medium they choose through self investigation, reflection, and comment.
AMoS: You are a poet yourself. Which poets (and poems) have most influenced your own work?
RH: I have to begin this answer with the traditional nod to Uncle Walt—really, where would we be without “Leaves of Grass”? But it is more than a nod in my case, as it is in many cases, maybe because he was one of the first to whom I was introduced, maybe because I just dearly love “Leaves of Grass.” And I have to say that I am equally influenced by Emily Dickinson, and as disparate as these two are in some ways, I think they both provide a great import for most contemporary poets. Another poet that I love is not heard about much these days: Stephen Crane. I think that Stephen Crane’s work is beautifully subtle and I tend to write in the same third person “observational” voice. Actually in answering this question I notice that in my writing I tend to like little editorializing, just like Stephen Crane, which one would not probably expect of an editor.
One of the strongest influences on my work is Ezra Pound. I was very fortunate in studying for my MA at NYU to be able to take one-on-one classes with William Packard. In one semester we read the complete works of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound—and I do mean complete. Both truly epic poets, and both equally influential, but one thing that I found with Pound was that one could also use his Cantos as a roadmap to find all these little bunny trails to follow and from Pound I found many other great thinkers such as Richard of St. Victor, John of the Cross, the Chinese poets Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Li Po, who had a tremendous impact on and me, so much so that when an aunt passed away and left me just enough money I traveled to China to see the “River of Stars” above the Yangtze.
Looking to antiquity, one poet I have often identified with, and again, that I find writes in an “observational” voice, is Archilochus. I think that his day job of mercenary also lends itself to a natural resonance for me as my “day job” is law enforcement officer at the Statue of Liberty and I am always intrigued by other poet/cops or poet/soldiers. Continuing in antiquity, then, Sappho, Homer, Catullus and Ovid. Then forward to Dante who I have studied extensively and who has had a tremendous impact upon my writing and thinking. And of course Shakespeare—for sound more than anything, and the freedom of thought. Onward to Blake and Wordsworth, and then in the more modern realm of thinking T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, H.D., and especially a poet regaining popularity recently, Mina Loy; Carl Sandburg for his accessibility; and then Ginsberg to an extent; and then definitely Kenneth Patchen for his picture poems—what a very under-recognized poet and visual artist; and, of course, Charles Bukowski. Then I have always loved reading William Packard especially for his sound, which I find amazing, as well as having the opportunity to study under him and learn his terrific take on the importance of sonnets and syllabic verse. I would also include contemporary poets such as Franz Wright, W.D. Snodgrass, Charles Wright, Jane Hirshfield, and James Fenton, just to name a few.
a
And last but not least, I have to say our poets, NYQ poets—I constantly see something that intrigues me or hear something that truly impresses me in the poems that we publish and I have to say that these poems do influence me—it would be too many to mention a list of these poets here, but I do admire all of these poets and feel that I gain a tremendous grounding from reading their work.
AMoS: Are there poets (or poems) that you admire but feel distant from?
RH: This is a very interesting question. Let me begin by saying that I admire every poem that I put into the magazine, or else it would not go in there. I, ultimately, am personally responsible for every poem that goes into the magazine and then in the layout and other editing I also play a major role in doing, so in addition to choosing the poems, I also become very intimate with the poems in the magazine. In reading for enjoyment, I find that I either become just as intimate with a poem that I admire or I don’t. And by becoming intimate with a poem, or artwork, or any other medium I have a sense of ownership because it does become a part of me. So to answer the question, I think I would have to say that either I admire it and own it, or simply ignore it altogether, I am not sure there is an in-between for me.
AMoS: Which visual artists do you most admire?
RH: In keeping with the voice of the magazine, and the overarching theme of this interview, I find that I like what most, I think, would consider a rather odd mix of visual artists. The first one to immediately leap to mind is Ansel Adams. I have always loved photography and the outdoors and I have admired the photographs of Ansel Adams for a very long time—he is probably one reason I became a Park Ranger. Another photographer that I dearly love is O. Winston Link, partly because, I am sure, of the fact I am originally from Roanoke, Virginia, my Grandfather worked for the Norfolk and Western Railroad, and I was raised around the trains, but also because of the amazing visions and context that he captured with such crisp and precise detail in his photographs of the trains. I especially am enthralled by the photo of the train passing over the Shenandoah river at night with the swimmers in the swimming hole—what an amazing photograph. Another is Frederic Church, he has this one painting, actually I think it was a study, called something like “Jamaican Sunset Scene,” from which “Afterglow” would later be painted, that hangs in the Olana Historic Site and that is absolutely an amazing explosion of color and emotion. And speaking of emotion, I once sat in front of Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 at MoMA just overwhelmed by the emotion I was feeling come from that painting—I have often had that reaction to Pollock. And I have to say emotion-wise I have also had a very strong connection with Brancusi’s “Golden Bird,” as well as the work of Louise Bourgeois.
And since I believe art begins with self investigation, I have been strongly impressed and influenced by Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle—a true odyssey of both self and societal investigation. And looking purely to film, I dearly love anything done by David Lynch, but have so many others that I appreciate as well.
AMoS: How would you assess the state of American poetry today?
RH: If we look at the microcosm of our society that is involved in literature and the arts, I think one could make the case that poetry is not in too bad a shape. I have dealt with this question in my forthcoming book, Poetic Amusement (Fall, 2008, Athanata Arts, Ltd.); however, I find I wrestle with it every day. At first blush one could say that there is too much “po’ biz” going on, that the commercialism of the MFA degree and the explosion of literary magazines with new printing models, both internet and one-off, are flooding the literary minds of America with tons of extraneous garbage. And one might not be wrong in making this assessment. However, I think that the literary community in time will have the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I think ultimately this might be indicative of every age. What makes our time right now more unique is not only the business of the MFA programs, but the development of the internet. And though it’s difficult to navigate the explosion of changes at the moment, this makes it a very exciting time in which to live. I truly find it tantamount to having been around at the invention of the printing press. The internet provides so many possibilities that need to be explored, and like many of the magazines out there today we are doing our bit of exploring how this new technology might be used.
So while we have our intrinsic problems and arguments within the poetry community—all of which I am convinced will work themselves out—the true disaster comes when we look at society as a whole. If we look at the state of American poetry today through the lens of society as a whole, we see a complete disaster—much like a locomotive heading straight for a school bus stalled on the tracks. While poetry is flourishing in one respect within its own community, it has become diminished to a mere flicker in society. Poetry has been taught for so many years as a crypto-quote, that most people do not think they have the capacity to understand it. That is the bus being stalled on the tracks. The other part of the equation is the locomotive. We as a society seem to have digressed so far away from a poetic sensibility. Capitalism has risen to such a subconscious national religion in this country that most work way too hard at getting ahead—or in our current state to keep their heads above water—to have time to read or write poetry. What does poetry matter? Well as we have seen, poetry is about self-investigation, self-understanding— completely antithetical to the selfishness of capitalism, but ultimately it is this self-understanding that this country has lost, this poetic sensibility. And I firmly believe that if we lead people to once again explore their poetic sensibilities, to demonstrate that poetry is accessible and understandable, society as a whole will be so much the better for it.
AMoS: Whom would you identify as our strongest contemporary poets? If you’d prefer to take a pass on this question, no problem…
RH: I will not take a complete pass on this question, but let it suffice to say that I think many of our strongest poets are not necessarily our most well-known poets. This is why I dedicate myself to maintaining The New York Quarterly as a forum for all poets I feel have a strong voice, both known and soon to be known; to have a place where strong voices may be heard regardless of their fame or allegiance to a particular school of thought or style. And this is why so many literary magazines need to be in print, not just The New York Quarterly.
AMoS: Finally, the house question: when you hear the word “stylish,” whom or what do you think of?
RH: Not me, that is for sure. Aside from my uniform at work I wear jeans and henleys—sometimes I get daring and mix it up with a bright colored henley. I have my set for summer and set for winter and haven’t fit into a suit in years. But, seriously, I have to think about that term “stylish,” it could mean so many things. Taken as its literal meaning and relating that to the world of poetry, I would have to say that what comes to mind is hip-hop and/or rap. If we measure stylish as what is most prevalent in popular culture, if we accept that Dante was stylish because he wrote in the vernacular rather than Latin, or Whitman was stylish because he broke the iambic pentameter, and confessionals like Snodgrass or Plath because they wrote about themselves, or the Beats like Ginsberg were stylish, or Bukowski was stylish, then stylish could be seen as progressive, cutting edge, or as in every example above, that which once again opened up poetry to the masses. And I really do not see that in the poetry community today, but if you expand that community to society as a whole and include the influence of music, you find rap and hip-hop being the closest thing we have today to stylishness in poetry. And while there can be many arguments both for and against this statement, one cannot ignore the fact that it is rap and hip-hop that is on everyone’s lips just like Dante’s verse was on every ditch digger’s tongue. ◊
