Quincy,
While I am glad to hear that you have found Unsplendid a good read so far, I'd appreciate it if you not rush to make assumptions about what I claim to represent or what Unsplendid is--based on a single issue. Unsplendid is NOT, repeat NOT, supported or sponsored by any entity at Johns Hopkins. Punto. I have said as much on these boards before. While I did speak somewhat in the voice as one _teaching_ in The Writing Seminars, I am working damned hard to ensure that the journal not become a kind of entrenched Hopkins-grad-only pub. Other journals, some university-based and some not, have become incestuous in a way that I want to avoid. We have gone out of our way to solicit and review work from non-Hopkins, non-Ohio State folk like Geoff Brock, Alicia Stallings, Jill Rosser, Harvey Hix, John Poch, Peter Campion, Ben Howard, Jennifer Perrine, Hailey Leithauser, Dan Beachy-Quick, Elizabeth Hadaway, Eric McHenry, Anne Pierson Wiese, Mark Jarman, and many others yet to come. If I sound defensive, well, what can I say, you made me a bit hot under the collar, you did.
Something that one has to admit, however, is that there simply aren't many writing programs in the U.S. in which meter and received forms weigh so heavily in the curriculum as they do at Hopkins and OSU. Mostly it's scattered "formalists" plying their trade wherever they can, or "decamped" poets writing in meter, etc. Bottom line, I want to cull their best work together and promote it via Unsplendid as much as I want to do the same with the best work by poets I once had the pleasure of calling colleagues and associates. I don't even want to see the journal as a regional publication. The whole point was to make poetry in received and nonce forms as widely accessible as possible, to avoid the fate of yet another undersold/understocked print journal or anthology.
Maybe I erred in repeating what others have said about poetry scenes elsewhere in the world (Italy's being the only one I know from direct personal experience)--I was just objecting to the old line about the death of poetry, etc. Fer Jiminy's sake I slapped no labels on anyone, deserved or undeserved.
Best,
D
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