The Poetry Mafia

Issue 68 starts off with a non-fiction piece by Birkerts himself. It's about the photographer Robert Frank, and Birkerts happily riffs about Frank's compelling eye by starting with a discussion of Frank's book The Americans. It's a pretty common book, and if you've ever worked in a bookstore you've probably found it damaged and misplaced amongst bigger and more aggressively bound photo books. Here I must stop to comment on Sven Birkerts' own personal history, I happened to read Birkerts' autobiographical book My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time. (2002), in it he talks about his younger days, living in Massachusetts, struggling a bit, writing reviews, and even working in a bookstore. Think about it, the writer of The Gutenberg Elegies (1994) trying to shelve books that customers had tossed horizontally on top of their neat rows, nota beneBirkerts has done his time from bottom up.

Following Birkerts' piece are a couple of poems by Stephen Sandy and Judith Vollmer, they're very good and by certain hints I suspect that they are on the lee side of middle age (Alice Cooper is mentioned in one), it's one of the best qualities about AGNI: they're  not aiming to be young and they let older artists take the lead . Case in point: Robert Pinsky (in this issue with "the  Procession," and a Dante translation) a hyper-talented author who you might see walking through Inman Square, Rita Dove (famous but not from around here), Michael Mazur ("I'll tell what I saw," about his artwork for Dante's Inferno and who is affiliated with Harvard), and Robert Gardner the documentary filmmaker (an essay and a film that's included with this issue, also Harvard affiliated [I would like to point out that the DVD that came with my issue wont play , has anyone else had that problem?]). What this adds up to is a collection - mafia :) - of local and battle scarred artists that have come together to add content to an outstanding literary magazine. Does Pinsky really need to have his writing here? No. It's a testament and a bow to the magazine as a whole.

To toss some negativity into the mix, the three fiction stories that lead this issue are all only just good. If someone wrote them in a creative writing class I'd drool all over how there are no problems with them and what can you do about that fact? You can't workshop them and make them better. I still  remember what the character Samuel's horse is called in Steinbeck's East of Eden years and years ago and these stories have already left my addled head through some emergency exit. In fact this AGNI is really a poetry AGNI - all its poems are complex and slippery and its fiction tends to be more inert. Exceptions include: Nadia Gregor's The Dysthenic Revelation and Gary Amdahl's The Lesser Evil: this is really strange but both of these stories make small passing references to Javier Marias, the spanish novelist and creator of that fat trilogyYour Face Tomorrow... that so slowly dissects of the concept of deception. Why the references, who knows? I would bet that not even Sven Birkerts knows and it is a sly joke to himself, because he happened to place the stories next to each other in this issue.