In jubilat's
fifteen issues, I've had the opportunity to publish many of my favorite
poets—poets I first read and loved as an undergraduate, as well as poets who
had taught and mentored me in the two decades that followed, such as John
Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Heather McHugh, W. S. Merwin, Dara Wier, and James Tate.
This was a great honor, and a thrill to boot — I still marvel at seeing their
poems in the pages of the magazine. But my job is not simply to feature
established poets I admire, whose poetry shows up — and has, for many years,
shown up — in all sorts of great places. No, my job is also to find poets
whose work isn't in other literary magazines like ours, and maybe not even in
literary magazines at all — at least not before we publish them! The idea of
debuting a poet, while obviously romantic, is also essential to a literary
magazine like ours. We must continually find new voices to add to the mix of
our 160 pages per issue, to place the the established voices in a larger and
more vital context and create the most dynamic conversation about poetry that
we can.
With this in mind, I'd like to introduce the last poem in
jubilat no. 3 — a poem written by a brilliant (and very friendly!) Harvard
Ph.D. student I'd just met:
A VILLAGE JOURNAL
Went to the knife-grinder with my broken tool
and a gunny sack brimming with soy. Was told to return
the third or the second day; withdrew to my lean-to;
made out a report, buried it under the threshold.
Outside: a rust-colored beetle crawling the fabric.
Inside: night-mowers sweeping a violet meadow.
Affixed a red pin to each point where they'd been;
took down the projection; rolled it up in a canister.
Scrubbed my blister. Boxed the green pins. Practiced
in front of the mirror for a while. Mainly greetings
and some simple questions: what sort of machines
Did they stay very long? Lay down on the string bed.
The stringy bed. A new kind of sleep. Dry, mottled,
clawed flakes of sleep; sleep of the father thrumming.
Woke to the granite wheel sound. Mist, thatch.
Radioed ahead; was told to wait, waited; smoked.
It's easy now to see what we saw then, in this quiet,
elegant poem: a subtly unsettling account of the psyche at war, in "a new
kind of sleep" no report can keep buried. (It is also, alas, more timely
now than in the spring of 2001.) And when I told my new friend the editors and
I had all agreed on "A Village Journal," I was surprised to learn
he'd never published a poem before. Srikanth Reddy was therefore our first bona
fide debut, and an auspicious one at that: since then, his poetry has shown up
in such illustrious magazines as American
Poetry Review, Grand
Street, and Ploughshares, and his remarkable first collection of poems, Facts for Visitors, was published in the University
Press's New California Poetry Series in 2004. But
he was ours first! I can only hope that among the thousands of submissions we
receive each year, we continue to find a handful of such poets, and poems, to
champion in our pages.
— Rob Casper