Home		Martin Lammon What’s in a Name?
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		Late November 1998, our first issue nearly ready for typesetting and printing, I was in Spain browsing through a bookstore at the University of Sevilla. I wanted to buy a literary journal, an Andalusian counterpart to Arts & Letters. Traveling light, I promised myself to choose just one journal—but how to choose? Then, after examining several tables of contents, I saw a familiar name in the journal Turia: Revista Cultural. Juan Carlos Galeano was one of ours, his poems scheduled to appear in our first issue with translations by Virgil Suarez and Delia Poey. I turned to his poem on page 106 and there was a bigger surprise. Originally, I had accepted four poems by Galeano, but later he emailed to explain that the fourth was already taken. His poem “Mesa” had been a favorite, about a table that dreams of becoming an animal, and I had been disappointed to lose it. But here I was in Spain, browsing through revistas in una libreria universitaria, finding the poem I had lost. True story. For 1,000 pesetas (about seven dollars), you can order Turia: Revista Cultural (número 45) at: IET Plaza Pérez Prado, 3 44001 Teruel España In a post-modern age, I might risk my assistant editor Keith Hendrix’s good opinion if, hopelessly romantically, I found purpose behind this serendipitous yet utterly random event. (Or I might earn his good opinion; I’m still unsure exactly what Post-Modernism is.) I just know that I wanted Arts & Letters to pay attention to a world that was larger than my own corner of it. Finding Galeano’s poem in Sevilla, I held in my hands tangible evidence, however small and romantic, of what I wanted. * A reader might wonder why Dante and Ghalib appear in a self-styled “journal of contemporary culture.” First, W. S. Merwin and Robert Bly are among our own time’s most distinguished and prolific poet-translators. Second, Dante is a contemporary poet, essential to any twenty-first century poet-in-waiting, the way Basho, Shakespeare, Li Po, and Rumi are essential and timeless. Third, Bly and Sunil Dutta’s book The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib is brand new, due out this year. Dutta points out in his introductory essay to the book that Ghalib is among India’s most revered poets yet relatively unknown in Europe and the Americas. I found out how contemporary Ghalib was when I talked to a young man from Nepal, who is studying business at Georgia College & State University, where my wife is International Student Advisor. Vikas did not know much about poetry, but when I asked if he had ever heard of Ghalib, he was practically quoting lines to me. The World Poetry Translation series will be a regular feature of Arts & Letters, offering poems in their original languages and in English translations. Another feature will be the Mentors Interview series. In some cases, interviewers may have actually studied with the writer or artist they are interviewing, but it was never our intention to define so narrowly mentor as teacher. Our first interview, with author Ernest J. Gaines, is a case in point. Interviewer Tracy Mishkin never studied with Gaines, yet after he visited her seminar devoted to his books, she and her students (to use her own words) “were able to get a sense of him as a person who writes, not just as a writer.” Her candid interview lives up to that claim. Each issue will devote significant space to a featured artist, whose work will appear in an enamel plate insert as well as on our cover. Arts & Letters will also feature timely essay-reviews of books that you won’t usually hear about in the New York Times Book Review or Time. Usually, we will review books that have been published within the year. Poetry will get a lot of attention, especially significant books published at university and independent presses. We may now and then review fiction and nonfiction titles when we identify an important book that’s been overlooked by the media that traditionally review prose books. One regular feature I hope our readers will look forward to is the cultural commentary of Dinty W. Moore, regular essayist for Arts & Letters. His first contribution—“Cowardly New World: Getting a Life in the Age of Virtual Reality”—stakes ground that lies somewhere between his two recent books: The Accidental Buddhist and The Emperor’s Virtual Clothes. Each issue, Moore will hold up a mirror to the world we live in, virtual or otherwise. Other writers will also contribute essays on literature, culture, and their own private worlds: E. Ethelbert Miller writes in this issue about his own journey within the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s; Debra Marquart writes about a young stranger named Debbie, who wants to be called Deb, and her coming of age with a grain elevator man in Midwest America. Arts & Letters is also devoted to publishing the world’s best fiction, poetry, and drama that we can lay our hands on. We claim no editorial preference except excellence. Each year, we will sponsor a competition, the Arts & Letters Prizes in fiction (short story), poetry, and drama (one-act play), offering $1,000 and publication to each winner (see the inside front cover of this issue for guidelines). Final judges for this year’s competition are Doris Betts in fiction, Alice Fulton in poetry, and Horton Foote in drama. Winners and possibly a few finalists will be published in our second issue, fall 1999. What’s in a name? Simply put, what you see is what you get. * But it’s rarely so simple as that. In Spain, I stood face to face with Picasso’s Guernica, a work I have wanted to visit for almost twenty years. As moving as the work was, somehow it was less than what I had anticipated. I saw Sevilla’s magnificent Catedral. In 1401, legend has it that the church authorities decided, “Let us create such a building that future generations will take us for lunatics.” I’d say that, in ways both ridiculous and sublime, the church succeeded. In Spain I also went to the cinema where Algo Paso Con Mary (“There’s Something About Mary”), like a dozen other Hollywood movies, had been dubbed in Spanish. Near the end of our trip, exhausted, my wife and I stayed in the hotel room one night. Switching television channels, we found Fox Mulder and Dana Scully on the X-Files arguing in melodramatic voices suspiciously similar to those we’d heard just three days before on the movie screen. Neither film nor video translated very well. I suppose this is the post-modern part of my introduction, the place where Picasso meets Gillian Anderson. But if one goal for Arts & Letters is to pay attention to a world that is larger than my own small corner of it, then another goal is to distinguish contemporary culture from popular culture. For me, that distinction is neither simplistic nor elitist. Neither medium nor milieu is the message—MTV is not to blame for Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. So-called “high culture” offers mediocre and passionless performances nearly as often as pop culture does. The concert pianist, video diva, or workshop-trained poet all have the potential to express genius and the greater potential to fall far short of that mark. What I hope Arts & Letters ultimately pays attention to is work that has the potential to endure, that moves us not only for the moment, not only for the end of the century, and not only for the end of the millenium. But worse, too often these days “culture” has been defined as that which sells the most tickets, makes the most money, arouses the most attention. It is easier, even more democratic and scientific, enumerating culture the way one takes a poll that will be revised weeks, if not days, later. Time magazine is publishing a series of Time 100 “keepsake” issues, six special issues featuring the century’s twenty most influential people in five different categories—including an “Artists and Entertainers” category—culminating in a sixth list that profiles the “Person of the Century.” In the June 8, 1998 “Artists and Entertainers of the Century” issue, Managing Editor Walter Isaacson reiterates that “the criterion, we kept having to remind ourselves, was influence, not greatness.” Later in his introduction, Isaacson elaborates: In the end a lot of people who may have been the best in their field (film director Ingmar Bergman, for example) did not make the list because their greatness surpassed their enduring influence. Necessarily, the commercial media—including Time—measure “influence” by the number of people empirically measurable by best-seller lists, sales records, and Nielsen ratings. Thus Steven Spielberg makes the top twenty list and Bergman does not. Thus Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot share space with Coco Chanel, Lucille Ball, and Bart Simpson. Such lists usually reflect a homogenization of culture or, worse, a majority ruling of culture. This is exactly what we find in such lists as The Modern Library Board’s recent 100 best novels published this century in English. * Is there another way to recognize “enduring influence”? In Spain, thanks to the knowledgeable recommendation of my fellow AWP Board member Carol Jane Bangs, I sought out Sevilla’s flamenco. In the hard-to-find bar La Carbonería, my wife and I found cantaores y guitarristas auténticos relaxing on benches, drinking vino tinto, cerveza, or vermouth. The three men were joined by a group of twenty or so Japanese men and women, whose leader spoke fluent Spanish and, twice, burst into his own excellent canción de flamenco, much to the pleasure of the local cantaores. My wife and I watched this strange and wonderful mix of Sevillano and Japanese culture. Hearing the Japanese man sing so well and so passionately, I thought I heard a resemblance to Japanese Noh music. My wife—who before we met had lived for two years in Japan—heard the resemblance, too. That night, what I heard was music that was timeless, song that was culturally personal and passionate, genius that crossed the boundaries between cultures. No one could measure, or prove, the influence or greatness of what I heard. That ineffability—you will find it in a poem such as Stuart Lishan’s “Blood Odds”— is what I hope Arts & Letters ultimately pays attention to.
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