期刊名称：PARNASSUS-POETRY IN REVIEW
 期刊简介(About the journal)
投稿须知(Instructions to Authors)
编辑部信息(Editorial Board)
About the journal
Parnassus: Poetry in Review was founded in 1973 by Herbert Leibowitz (editor) and Stanley Lewis (publisher) to provide a forum where poets, novelists, and critics of all persuasions could gather to review new books of poetry, including translations–international poetries have occupied center stage from our very first issue–with an amplitude and reflectiveness that Sunday book supplements and even the literary quarterlies could not afford. Reviews and essays, to be effective, would have to shun academic thinking and prose, and above all, embrace the diverse voices of democratic pluralism. Our literary profile has been defined by a passion for disinterested, wide-ranging, incisive commentary–and lilting prose; a poet’s reputation has never guaranteed a favorable or negative review. We never impose a point of view on any of our writers.
In 1976, Herbert Leibowitz set up the not-for-profit Poetry in Review Foundation to sustain publication of the magazine. From that date he has served as both publisher and editor. Although Parnassus: Poetry in Review functions without an editorial board, it avoids succumbing to the danger of narrow taste by asking poets to recommend gifted reviewers; the editor and his staff also scrutinize the pages of other literary magazines for strong new writers we can then invite to become contributors. The magazine prints original art for visual pleasure in every issue and has at times commissioned portraits of poets from such well-known artists as Philip Pearlstein, Alice Neel, Red Grooms, Romare Bearden–and young artists. Subscribers have praised our recent decision to publish original poetry, usually but not exclusively by poet-reviewers, alongside our customary blend of lively essays and reviews.
Parnassus: Poetry in Review?editorial philosophy is based on the assumption that reviewing is a complex art. Like a poem or a short story, a review essay requires imagination, scrupulous attention to rhythm, pacing, and supple syntax; space in which to build a persuasive, detailed argument; analytical precision and intuitive gambits; verbal play, wit, and metaphor. Stylish prose, alert to the numbing effects of repetition, is not frippery or decoration but an essential part of a review’s thought. "Caress the details," Nabokov’s wise counsel, is the motto woven on Parnassus: Poetry in Review?banner. Our high standards go along with a commitment to a spirit of inclusion and an openness to the new. We welcome and vigorously seek out voices that break aesthetic molds and disturb xenophobic habits.
In its three decades of existence, Parnassus: Poetry in Review has published seminal essays by such writers as David Barber, Sven Birkerts, Hayden Carruth, Guy Davenport, Mary Karr, Wayne Koestenbaum, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, Helen Vendler, Eric Ormsby, and Marjorie Perloff. Special theme issues of Parnassus: Poetry in Review appear regularly on such timely subjects as women and poetry, the long poem, words and music, autobiography, multiculturalism, and poetry and movies.
Our 624-page 25th anniversary issue was published in early 2001. This landmark survey of international poetries includes a special section on the Middle East, whose poems and essays represent a broad range of writers working in Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian–a comprehensive survey of the rich literary traditions of this complex region, known too much for its politics and too little for its verse. The anniversary issue also features penetrating essays on poetry from nearly all other points around the globe, from Hungary to China, as well as new poems by Seamus Heaney, Mahmoud Darwish, Kay Ryan, Mary Karr, and others. Even that most exotic land of all, the United States of America, is amply represented.
Reviews
"For poetry reviewing, the best magazine, of course, is Parnassus: Poetry in Review."
—James Laughlin
"Parnassus: Poetry in Review, like the mountain whose name it bears, rises up unchallenged"
—Helen Vendler
"Parnassus: Poetry in Review plays a central role in contemporary letters."
—Octavio Paz
"Without Parnassus: Poetry in Review, American poetry would be dangling from a blurb."
—Rodney Jones
Thank you to the members of the Poetry in Review Foundation Board for their generous support of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, their ingenious suggestions, their unfailing good humor, and their hearty appetite for poetry.
Ben Downing
Wendy Gimbel
Stephen Koch
Anne-Marie Levine
John Reiner
Margo Viscusi
William Wadsworth
Rachel Weintraub
Susan Yankowitz
We are grateful for the generous support of The Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund and The Tomorrow Foundation.
Publisher & Editor: Herbert Leibowitz
Co-Editor & Managing Editor: Ben Downing
Assistant Editors: Adam Dressler, Alyssa Varner
Design and Art Direction: Josh Neufeld
Printer: Science Press/Cadmus Press
Instructions to Authors
You may purchase an entire run of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, all 30 years, for a deeply discounted price. (We'll even pick up the postage!) Send inquiries to parnew@aol.com.
Click here for an overview of issues 1-29
Subscribe to Parnassus: Poetry in Review
Individual subscriptions to Parnassus: Poetry in Review cost $27 for two years.
Institutional and library subscriptions cost $46 for one year or $88 for two.
A sample issue costs $15.
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Please make all checks payable to Poetry in Review Foundation. There is a surcharge of $15 USD where foreign postal rates apply.
Editorial Board
Editor's Manifesto
As editor of Parnassus for nearly thirty years, I have stubbornly maintained that poetry criticism is an art, one requiring airtight argument, a passion for style, and even an entertainer’s wit and timing. A reviewer should, needless to say, be erudite and intellectually nimble, but also unintimidated by reputation and quick to point out such flaws as boring syntax and arbitrary line-breaks. Skepticism is all the more crucial nowadays, when books of poetry enter the world wrapped in a caul of blurbs.
Over the last fifteen years or so, as the prestige of high culture has steadily declined, the audience for belletristic criticism—as opposed to the jargon-riddled academic variety—has dwindled. Yet what I find perhaps even more distressing is the reluctance of poets to write honestly about their peers. Some poets, doves by temperament, are not suited to criticism. But many are simply too fearful. Looking warily over their shoulders, they mutter, “If I write a negative review of poet B’s book, he or a former student of his will pillory my own book when it’s published.?/FONT>
This widespread timidity, this failure of nerve, quashes the frank exchange of ideas; it closes the valves of everyone’s attention like stone, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. What should be a bracing intramural conversation turns bland, parochial, prevaricating. If reviewers, like a chorus of Pollyannas, hail nearly every poet as being worthy of a laurel wreath, why should we believe them?
Another aspect of this lamentable decline has to do with international poetry. Since the Fifties and Sixties, there’s been a sharp drop in the number of American poets who, falling under the spell of, say, Neruda, Celan, or Akhmatova, embark on a study of Spanish, German, or Russian so that they can read these poets?work in the original, and perhaps even translate it. (There are, of course, some notable exceptions.) I’m not sure to what this should be attributed. Laziness? Lack of curiosity? I don’t mean to minimize the difficulty of mastering Czech or Chinese. Still, an intimate relationship with another language, particularly its music, can only enrich the poet’s art, as Ezra Pound, the model of a linguistic voyager (and voyeur), demonstrated.
From its first issue, Parnassus has paid close attention to international poetry. The late Donald Sutherland, endowed with an extraordinarily cultivated literary mind, served as our roving ambassador to the courts of St.-John Perse and Valéry, Lorca and Viceinte Alexandre. And we’ve been fortunate, over a quarter-century, to draw on other experts who could interpret, with flair and acute understanding, the poems of Basho, Hölderlin, Tsvetaeva, Cavafy, Apollinaire, and many others.
So when it came time to pick a theme for our twenty-fifth anniversary issue, the choice was easy: We decided on an international number, with a special section devoted to Arab, Hebrew, and Persian poetry—rich, ancient traditions all, and too little known to American readers. We believe readers will marvel, as we do, at the classic verse of the Sephardic poet Shmuel HaNagid, the Persian poet Attar, and the Arab poet Labid. These poems will linger in memory and, I hope, rouse a desire in the reader to investigate such exquisite work more closely.
For me, these years have been like a non-stop, racy, irreverent conversation—and sometimes a quarrel—in the Mermaid Tavern. Friendships have blossomed out of my marginal comments and, on occasion, my hectorings. As a devout letter writer, I’ve delighted in corresponding with writers in Wichita, Strasbourg, Jerusalem, and a thousand places in between. Occasionally the discovery of a good poem in the slush pile has made my day. (We editors all like to believe that had Emily Dickinson submitted her poems to us, rather than to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, we would have spotted and nurtured her genius; such fantasies help divert us from the dirt-in-the-fingernails task of weeding repetitions.) And perhaps most satisfying of all has been watching young writers metamorphose from talented apprentices to brilliant reviewers.
The Joy of Cooking and The Joy of Sex have been perennial bestsellers. A book entitled The Joy of Editing would sell maybe a dozen copies before being rushed to the pulping machine. But I would gladly write it. When I stumbled into the role of editor, I was only vaguely aware that Parnassus is a mountain in Greece sacred to the Nine Muses. I quickly learned that editing was a calling that demanded a steep levy of time, toil, and imagination. Lugging pork up Parnassus has been, at moments, a Sisyphean task, but mostly it’s been an exhilarating challenge, crowned by spectacular vistas. Parnassah, in Hebrew, means prosperity—by editorial prestidigitation, I’ve managed to marry my Hebraism to my Hellenism.
—HERBERT LEIBOWITZ
The Editor Recommends
Albert Goldbarth, The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007 (Graywolf Press). Goldbarth’s imagination is nomadic, his curiosity omnivorous, taking him to 17th century Prague and an encounter with a golem, to Rembrandt’s studio where Gypsy Rose Lee happens to drop in, to the Chicago neighborhood he grew up in. Albert could outtalk and outwit Leno and Letterman, Stewart and Colbert; he’s much funnier than all of them.
The Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert, 1956-1998, translated by Alissa Valles (HarperCollins, to be published in February, 2007). Inexplicably, Zbigniew Herbert never won the Nobel Prize. A master ironist and fabulist, Herbert lived through and observed the horrors of war and totalitarianism. His poetry is a model of how to write political poetry, but his verse is also lyrical, learned but never pedantic.
Paul West, Tea with Osiris (Lumen Press). This beautiful, harrowing sonnet cycle chronicles the author’s extraordinary struggle with aphasia. One of our virtuoso stylists, a novelist of extraordinary range and accomplishment, West writes with verbal flair, wild humor, mordant tenderness, and a kind of heroic defiance--self-pity is conspicuously missing--about his affliction.
Books by Parnassus Authors
Eric Ormsby contributes an essay to The New York Sun's Wednesday Arts and Letters Section. Ormsby is a master of the feuilleton.
Acceptance Speech for the Poetry Foundation's 2007 Randall Jarrell Prize in Criticism
It is a great honor and a source of deep satisfaction to have my name linked with Randall Jarrell’s, who has been for me a model of how to write poetry criticism: incisively, with fierce integrity and an aversion to suffering lazy, mediocre poetry quietly. His judgments carried so much weight that even his close friends, Robert Lowell and John Berryman, trembled as they waited for him to deliver his well-thought out and documented verdict about their new books. His critical essays and reviews still live on the page, even though some of the books he wrote about have passed into oblivion. His essays on Whitman, Frost, William Carlos Williams, Stevens, and Marianne Moore remain peerless. Like Hazlitt, Jarrell quoted copiously from the works of the poets he elucidated. He swept away the debris of cant and conventional interpretations, allowing us to see their poems, as if for the first time. Like a good poem, his essays reward rereading.
Above all, Jarrell was a passionate truth teller. “Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself and, sometimes, doing so, is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art,?he observed in “The Age of Criticism.?Jarrell worried that the overproduction of criticism might eclipse the poems and novels that deserve pride of place. Critics, like parasites, necessarily had to feed on their artist hosts. Not surprisingly, he flayed the vast majority of critics for being dull. His list of their vices reads like the prospectus of a Dunciad for critics to match Pope’s Dunciad of eighteenth century Grub Street hacks and poetasters. Here’s Jarrell’s list: “graceless, joyless, humorless, long-winded, niggling, blinkered, methodical, self-important, clich?ridden, prestige-obsessed.?Jarrell might have been describing much of the academic criticism of the last thirty years.
The atmosphere for criticism in 2008 is very different from what it was when Jarrell wrote. In politics, criticism and dissent, even when done with reasoned analysis and factual evidence, are equated with treason and naivet? In the world of poetry and poetry criticism, theorists have ridiculed objectivity as a sham, a sly means of advancing a covert agenda. You know the doctrinaire arguments. I’d like to summon Randall Jarrell to refute this pernicious relativism. “Real criticism demands of human beings an almost inhuman disinterestedness, one which they adopt with reluctance and maintain with difficulty: the real critic must speak ill of friends and well of enemies, ill of agreeable bad works and well of disagreeable good ones; must admire writers whom his readers will snicker at him for admiring and dislike writers whom it will place him among barbarians to dislike.?We have lost the meaning of—and belief in—disinterestedness (it is often confused with uninterestedness). I can’t tell you how many times I have invited poets to review another poet’s work, only to be turned aside with the feeble excuse ?I can only say nice things about his book.?This timidity destroys any chance of a stimulating conversation about the merits of a new book of poems. To speak ill of a friend’s work requires courage and the suppression of a fear of lethal retaliation.
The tribe of Ben and Benita has always been fractions and competitive. I have heard a language poet speak of Howard Nemerov’s poetry with Olympic disdain as not worth reading. I once asked an experimental poet to review an A.R. Ammons book. He replied, haughtily and dismissively, that Ammons had not “advanced the craft.?If that judgment was correct, why did he refuse to show us where and why Ammons?poetry fell short? “Pull down vanity,?I told the sneering poet.
The O.E.D. defines criticism as “The act of passing judgment of the qualities or merits of anything.?A secondary definition, which has often supplanted the original one, is “fault finding,?which may encompass carping or debased judgments. The very language of criticism can resemble a land-mined field. Take the word discriminating. It can be a horrific word that spews out the bigot’s mindless and ugly discrimination against those he deems inferior or benighted. But the word also describes what poets, historians, and scientists do in their work: make discriminations. This process is integral to the pursuit of truth, not precious connoisseurship or smug elitism.
Parnassus has survived for over thirty years because like a salon at which guests of diverse opinion talk and argue, it offers criticism that is erudite and entertaining, raucous at times, and stringently argued at great length (we don’t tolerate ex cathedra pronouncements): like Jarrell, our reviewers are not afraid to stick their necks out. Parnassus is also catholic in its tastes; it patrols poetry’s coasts on different continents, picking up signals of new voices in Brazil, China, Poland, and Iran. In any issue of the magazine a reader may encounter an essay on Classic Arabic poetry, Surrealism, and the ballad, retrospectives on La Fontaine, Muriel Rukeyser, Zbigniew Herbert, Adrienne Rich, or reviews of First or Second books—all written in witty, stylish prose.I have edited Parnassus with the strong conviction that poetry criticism and reviewing can be, or at least should strive to be, an art.
When the late Stanley Lewis, the founding publisher of Parnassus, asked me what I thought of a magazine devoted to poetry reviews, I shot back “Who’d read it??nbsp; I was right?I>Parnassus has not exactly been a box office bonanza—but I was wrong, since the magazine filled a need. It has been a joy to assemble each issue—no zero population growth at Parnassus—to become friends with many poets (this tested my disinterestedness at times) and to be literary paterfamilias to young poets and critics who kept me from turning into an old fogey.
Parnassus was recently rescued from the hangman’s noose by a philanthropic stranger, in a series of improbable events that would make Shakespeare’s Pericles and Cymbeline seem plotted by James T. Farrell. Startled and moved by the outpouring of affection, dismay, respect, and sorrow that our imminent closing aroused, I started a file of condolence letters...Then I added a file of resurrection letters.
I would be remiss if I didn’t thank my co-editor, Ben Downing, who is a savvy and brilliant editor in his own right; my wife Susan, whom I met at a Parnassus party, which proves that sometimes rave reviews need not be venal, and finally to the Poetry Foundation for bestowing the Randall Jarrell Prize on my life’s work
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