Behind the scenes at The Great Paris Review Poetry Purge of 2010, part 4: Michael Schiavo interview with O’Rourke comment.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | extras

Let’s get this out of the way: I am friends with Michael Schiavo. I have published Michael Schiavo’s poems. Michael Schiavo, correspondingly, is friends with me.  He has published my poems.

Michael never needed my help getting his work published—nearly all the major journals have featured his work ; as his idol Ralph Waldo Emerson might have put it, writing to Walt Whitman, others have celebrated his poems as he began his career. His first book, The Mad Song, is a superb sequence that other people love.

Because we are friends, Michael was the first to step forward about the Paris Review un-accepting business, and was kind enough to bring me up to speed. He wanted me to put up announcement about his Equalizer project, which would feature the poems The Paris Review deemed unfit to print. I decided to use his revelation as a basis to pitch a story to magazines instead, and again, Michael was very cool with that. The story ended up here instead—I’ll talk about that later—and it’s his unacceptance email that I included in my first post. As a fellow traveler in Poetryland, we both could confirm just how sui generis this Purge was, and how it could have been swept under the table.  (And apparently has been in the past, vis a vis Paris Review, but that’s all anecdotal and largely unconfirmed.)

Michael will sound like a serious-minded fellow in this interview.  He’s dead-serious about his work—he describes his first books, written and yet-to-be-written, as “not just companion pieces, not just part of a trilogy, but possibly a pentateuch, sharing elements/styles/voice between books and introducing others along the way, unique to that particular project, whether it be form or mode.” That said, I also have to point out that I think he is one of the most amazingly funny people I’ve met.  He’s self-aware, realistic, and really kind.

Michael Schiavo’s story centers around his working with Meghan O’Rourke, poet and former co-editor of the Review’s poetry section.  It was well-timed, then, to hear from her over email as I am composing this headnote intro.  It seems appropriate to include her on-the-record comments here.

“I’m saddened by the decision to return poems that we’d singled out for publication—poems we were moved by and believed in,” O’Rourke writes from Paris. “Of course, I understand Lorin’s need to shape the magazine according to his editorial vision. But given the situation, it became clear that it wouldn’t make sense to stay on as poetry editors. If I can do anything to help the poets whose work has been returned, I’ll be more than happy to do so—as Dan says, that’s a priority.”

So there’s that.  Anyway, I asked Michael some questions, same as I did with Joshua Corey and others, and here’s what he has to say.

Tell me about how your poems got to be accepted by The Paris Review.  Take it from the top.

I’d emailed Meghan O’Rourke after she started her posts for Slate about losing her mother to cancer. My mother died of breast cancer in 1995. We wrote occasionally to each other about the ways in which we both dealt (or didn’t deal) with our respective losses, quotes about loss and grief, and I was, as always, throwing Emerson her way.

At some point in early 2009, I took the bold step of sending her, unsolicited, some work from my current manuscript, Green Mountains, which were about—as much as my poems are “about” one particular subject; they’re about what’s about—my mother and grief/loss in general. I’d been rejected by The Paris Review before, even by Meghan a few years ago when I sent chapters from The Mad Song, so I had no reason to think this time would be different, even with our friendly correspondence. In fact, I expected a swift but kind rejection.

So it was one of those instances where you had some interactions with the editors, and that contact might or might not get one’s work from a slushier pile to just slush.  These are the things writers take note of as they send work out. OK, so what happened when your poems were accepted?

My three poems were accepted by Meghan O’Rourke, after consulting with Dan Chiasson and Phillip Gourevitch, in July 2009.  I was visiting a friend in Astoria when I got the acceptance. Informing my father, who is not a literary man, I had to contextualize why exactly it was a big deal for a writer to appear in The Paris Review.

I sent him the link to their website and he wrote back: “Very impressive….Beckett, Roth, Kerouac, Plimpton and Schiavo. Wow! I love you. Dad.”

My father’s always been supportive of me, but I think this was the first time he realized what I’d been doing since age 12. I was now in a publication with writers whose names even he recognized.

Over time, I had several exchanges with both Meghan and [former senior editor] Christopher Cox regarding publication date, which was at first ballparked to be Fall 2009. A few months ago, I made some slight changes to one poem, asked to have a dedication to my friend Whit Griffin added to another; I even asked Meghan’s advice as to whether the poems should be preceded by this epigraph from Constance Rourke’s American Humor: “He always demanded an audience: yet in the end, though he included the critic, though his self-consciousness grew noisy and acute, his finest efforts seemed mainly for his peers.”

Never once did they indicate that the poems might be returned, and they were courteous and professional through the whole process. What’s ironic is that the poems, especially “Wisdom and Goodness to the Vile Seem Vile,” address people’s inability to recognize art that is not strictly highbrow, that may have its roots more in the common and everyday than in the academy or critical theory.

You’ve worked with a lot of editors, and this sounds to be a particularly gracious and professional process. Getting emails from senior editors, production schedules.

While part of me that was thrilled to be in The Paris Review because of its storied history, that my poetry would appear in the same journal that published Douglas Crase (among many other literary heroes), I was even happier that I’d found in Meghan a reader who got the poems, who saw the traditions, both literary and otherwise, I was weaving together, saw the living fire I was trying to wrangle.

Liam Rector used to say, quoting his friend Rudd Fleming, “Find those with whom you have rapport and proceed. And never proceed with those with whom you do not have rapport.” Whether The Paris Review or The Podunk Review, I’d found an editor—like Morgan Lucas Schuldt and Matt Hart and Shanna Compton and Steve Church and Mark Bibbins elsewhere—who understood my work. That’s a valuable thing for any writer to have.

Take me through to the time between then and the un-acceptance. If I am getting the timeline right, this capped off a whole lot of personal shit, travails and tragedies, you’ve been going through, right?

It was a little over a year between acceptance and return. In that time, my father suffered two strokes and a series of brain seizures that left him incapacitated for a few months (he’s since recovered). I lost my job because I had to take care of him in Florida, went on unemployment, in January lost my hard drive and 20 years of work (I got that back), and am now working only 20 hours a week as a casual part-time employee for a company that may not be able to hire me full-time.

After all that, having poems returned by The Paris Review seems inevitable…and hardly a blip on the things-I-lose-sleep-over radar. The rejections might be more destructive, professionally, to poets who teach, like Josh Corey and G.C. Waldrep, whose job evaluations by their peers might depend upon publishing in recognized journals. Even if Mr. Stein had kept my poems, knowing that Josh and G.C., two poets whom I admire, had their work returned, would’ve left a bad taste.

Your unacceptance email is in fact the one I ran in the first post about this, and reading it basically got me thinking how surreal all this was.

My first reaction was disbelief. I’d received an email the week prior—on the anniversary of my acceptance—from Christopher Cox, informing “Paris Review poets” that he was leaving to take a job at Harper’s, and here was the name of the editor who would be taking over for him if we had any questions, and that Robyn Creswell would be in touch shortly about the work.

So it sounds like some things were up on the air in the Review’s offices.  I just looked out the window from my seat on the train and there’s the sign on the bridge in the New Jersey capital: Trenton Makes The World Takes. I still don’t know what that means.  What did you think it meant when the Review un-accepted your poems?

Honestly, I didn’t quite fathom the rejection email the first time I read it, vague and impersonal as it is. Having received my share of rejections, I recognized the tone, which was boilerplate. But that tone usually only appears when you get rejected outright, the editor is crushed by submissions and doesn’t feel moved to even scribble “Pls snd agn” on the Xeroxed slip [Please send again].

I’ve had journals disappear that have accepted my poems, never to hear from them, having to figure it out myself. I’ve had journals accept poems and push back the publication date for years. But I’ve never before had poems returned to me after they’ve been accepted.

I’m with you.

I’ve edited literary journals in high school, at UConn, at the Bennington Writing Seminars, most recently Tight, and now The Equalizer, and it’s never been an option to accept and then return a poem. In fact, when my hard drive crashed in January, I lost all the work I’d already accepted for The Equalizer. Part of me wanted to scuttle the whole project. But I thought of poets like Henry Gould, who’d given me a book-length manuscript to publish, who had already altered the publication info in his book to reflect that, and I couldn’t, in good conscience, not move forward with the project.

A respected journal like The Paris Review has donors and board members and former and potential contributors who might care not only what is published but how writers are treated. It doesn’t make any sense to me, short of a journal folding, to create that kind of bad faith with a member of your audience. I know Mr. Stein wants to put his stamp on the journal, and I respect that. But he’s also representing almost 60 years of literary history, a cultural institution bigger than himself.

It’s left me wondering, after all these decades of going to AWPs [endnote 1], loving CLMP [endnote 2], subscribing to PW [endnote 3], if I just haven’t learned anything about how a writer is supposed to carry him or herself, or that there is a separate set of rules inside castle walls I’ve never even seen.  I never, ever wanted to adopt the journal-editors-are-the-enemy school of thought, because I think they are the ones who are running the engine of anything that resembled a literary culture.  But this gives me pause, and frankly some people’s reaction to it. There is a little Dan Brown conspiracy voice I’ve had in my head that I’ve suppressed for a long time, and I don’t want to let it out.

If we can’t expect editors to treat their writers with some kind of understanding and respect, who’s left? This action seems panicky. Are Mr. Stein and Mr. Creswell worried that they won’t be around long enough to publish the work they want, so they best get started right out of the gate? Even if it was, indeed, a year’s-worth of work, you should honor your colleagues’ choices and publish it. I’d say that even if I wasn’t one of the rejected. I don’t understand the managerial style of keeping Meghan and Dan on board to advise, while returning work they approved long before Mr. Stein got there. Seems injurious as well as insulting. Keep them on the masthead as poetry editors until the work they took runs its course, but do the right thing and honor your institution’s decisions and those of your co-workers.

It’s all sad.  I think about those times I felt like I was part of something, or reached some goal or simply had a happy moment.  Reading a couple times at The Poetry Project’s New Years reading is up there for me.  Getting books out with Soft Skull Press.  Having work in Paris Review, for me at least, would be another. Well, I guess that’s never gonna happen now.  But still.

I think why we’re talking about this is because it’s The Paris Review. The establishment. Professionalism. Big time. Serious business. You expect some level of, as you put it, honor among thieves. Your experience with La Petite Zine is a perfect example. You honored the work the previous editor had accepted. Because this thing we do is about communion, not power.

That Mr. Stein would freely brag to The New York Observer about his and Mr. Creswell’s relationship to the poetry — “It’s kind of interesting to have someone who isn’t himself a poet any more than I am” — gives me pause. I’m not sure how high Mr. Gourevitch’s knowledge of contemporary poetry rises, but he was keen enough to bring aboard Charles Simic, Meghan O’Rourke, and later Dan Chiasson to help him fill in the gaps. Of course, he’s also a writer.

It’s a matter of some debate, this whole should practicing or “real” poets be the poetry editors or gatekeepers themselves.  You could make the case that being a poetry editor is a discrete skill set; I am not sure if Creswell edited anything, poetry or not.

Of course you have to take such evaluations on a case-by-case basis and we’ll see what we get in the fall. Are all poet-editors good, at either role? No. Are all bad? No. Are all non-writer editors bad? Obviously not. But for the first time, The Paris Review is edited by someone who isn’t a writer — a creator, a maker, a namer — himself. That the poetry editor does not write poetry is also troubling. Bird-watchers, not birds.

The test will be in this first “holy shit” issue they publish in September and then subsequent issues, knowing, as I’m sure they do, that it’s easy to publish the established, harder to seek out the genius still working in obscurity, as The Paris Review has done time and time again. Time’s the revelator.

The Revelator—I think that was the name of a mid-period Joe Walsh record. You really fall on the practitioner-as-editor/critic/gatekeeper school then?

I’m speaking specifically of the tradition of The Paris Review in that regard, and even more specifically when it comes to poetry. Despite the boorish treatment I received—knowing I’m not alone, and in good company—I say with all sincerity that I hope it is indeed an excellent issue. Not only for the sake of The Paris Review but for the larger culture of American letters. I hope there are poems in there that make do make me say “holy shit” and I’ll give all credit to them.

Even when I read a poem or story in The Paris Review that I don’t particularly care for, I know that, in the bigger picture, The Paris Review actuallygets what writers do, no matter the style or school, largely because the editors are—were—writers themselves. After the first Stein/Creswell-edited issue hits, no one will care whose poems got returned and, somehow, the sun will still rise.

I mean, let’s look at some of the email again:

In order to give Robyn the scope to define his own section, I regret to say, we will not be able to publish everything accepted by Philip, Meghan, and Dan. We have not found a place for your poems, though we see much to admire in them and gave them the most serious consideration.

This is political speak. It means nothing. This work had been accepted a year ago, before Mr. Gourevitch said he was leaving. I don’t think Meghan and Dan—whom I hold blameless in all of this—tried to load more poems in the queue before Mr. Gourevitch departed. If Mr. Stein had wanted to establish a relationship with me, he would’ve kept at least one of the poems. He could have given some compelling excuse as to why he couldn’t publish them all, but kept at least one.

Couple this with the form explanation—that didn’t include “Please submit again” or “Do you have anything else that we feel might fit better with the new direction we’re taking?”—and you start to see a picture.

Well, I guess they would then have to define what that definition is first.

This is what I divine: “I don’t like your poetry. I don’t like the tradition you write out of. We’re never going to publish you.” True: why would he and Mr. Creswell want to proceed with a poet with whom they do not have rapport? True also: why would I proceed with them?

I think Joshua Corey actually wrote back after his email. Did you do that?

I’ve not responded to Mr. Stein directly, nor do I plan to. He’s told me all I need to know, via his email, and via various profiles that have appeared since he received his new post in March. As he’s unlikely to change his position on my work, there’s no reason to contact him. Why waste each other’s time?

Instead, I’ve opened up The Equalizer, a new PDF-based journal I’ve been prepping this past year, as a home for those poems The Paris Reviewreturned. No doubt said poems, whose quality was good enough to be accepted by the Review, can find more high-profile homes. But to those poets who are interested, please forward along the rejection email you received from Mr. Stein (as proof) as well as the rejected poems to theunrulyservant (at) gmail (dot) com.

Final thoughts, Mr. Schiavo?

Mr. Stein has the absolute power. I suppose he had every right to do what he did, as there’s no rule book, save etiquette, honor, and doing the generous thing. So the question is: should he have done it? To quote the poet: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” Or, as another poet, Joe Strummer, once said, “Without people, you’re nothing.” And I believe it’s mainly people who read The Paris Review.

As for me, I’ll go where the cats & dogs can read, and be, as [Charles] Olson suggests, “anywhere / where there are little magazines / will publish you.”

_________

Inside Baseball Endnotes

[endnote 1] Associated Writing Programs, membership organization for creative writing programs and writers. Has yearly conference where hundreds of literary journals and small presses, Paris Review among them, set up tables at a bookfair, have readings, panels, shmooze. I’m a member.

[endnote 2] Council for Literary Magazines and Presses, membership advocacy organization that provides super resources for journals and small presses and writers alike. I’m a member.

[endnote 3]  Poets & Writers, a magazine and nonprofit advocacy group. Supports readings.  I’ve written stories for them, am in their writers directory, they have helped fund readings I’ve run over the years.