One of the most modest and generous print publications ongoing is Sylvester Pollet's Backwood Broadsides Chaplet Series.
Modest? 8 1/2 x 14 inch paper folded into fourths, each chaplet offers but six 3 1/2 x 8 1/2 inch pages of a single writer's work. The "cover" include's the writer's name, the title of the chaplet, the title of the series, the issue number, and the price. The back page offers a brief biography of the writer, a logo consisting of a sea serpent wrapped around an achor, and a list of the other chaplets in the series. No other design elements. Get the writing, the presentation says, in the palm of a hand, light, crisp, clear. Leave the fireworks to Hunter S. Thompson.
Generous? Backwood's published over ninety writers. Many rub shoulders in numerous other publications -- Robert Creeley, Carl Rakosi, James Laughlin, John Taggart, Joan Retallack, Clayton Eshelman, Pierre Joris -- but many are writers new to me: Susan Maurer, Bronislava Volkova, Stephen Paul Miller and Gary Lawless. Opening space to poets who established themselves in the 50s and 60s, Backwoods also clears space for emerging writers.
Late to the series (I first caught it at #69, pieces by Dale Smith), my favorites include: Michael McClintock's "Anthology of Days," nine beautiful haibun (prose/haiku); John Taggart's "5 Pastorelles"; Bob Arnold's "Yokel," bringing to hilarious life some of the people/places/situations of Vermont's Green Mountains; the eroticism of Georgia Scott's "Cakes With Bathsheba"; Mark Melnicove's cross-out poems from "Foreign Policy"; and Hoa Nguyen's "Add Some Blue," a series of poems that evoke without sentimentality birthing and motherhood.
Bravo, Mr. Pollet.
Backwood Broadsides available for $10 yr, 8 issues, ppd. from Sylvester Pollet, 963 Winkumpaugh Rd., Ellsworth, ME 04605-9529
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