Evergreen

A prose poem of mine was just accepted by Evergreen Review, the online incarnation of the famous print review edited by Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press; Rosset, at 87, is still its Editor In Chief. (The prose poem, by the way, is also forthcoming in my collection, Passenger Flight.) It will appear the March #118 issue.

According to this Wikipedia article, the original Evergreen Review, published between 1957 and 1973, debuted pivotal works by Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Gunter Grass, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O'Hara, Kenzaburo Oi, Octavio Paz, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott and Malcolm X.

The people in the online version are mostly relative unknowns, as I suppose many of those august names were at that time; but from what I've read, the actual writing in the current Evergreen is no better nor worse than any of a plethora of other fair/middling reviews on the market today. Clearly Rosset isn't able to draw on the same kind of pool of concentrated calibre he could then. Oh well. I liked some of what I saw, and there's an edgier flavour here than what we typically find in Canada -- could we imagine, say, RW Watkin's Jesuits in Fiddlehead? (it was Watkins, a frequent commenter on this blog, who first drew my attention to this review) -- so I sent what I imagined they might like, to see how I would do.

This, incidentally, is the longest wait for an acceptance yet. The poem was part of a handful originally submitted on Dec. 28, 2007; a letter of inquiry last June went unanswered, and I started sending the poems elsewhere (they came back). Then a couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail requesting me to resubmit my poems, et voila!