Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

clayton eshleman, 26, rue des abbesses, paris 18

dear Peter,

I would like to respond to Mick Gibbs' and Peter Jay's remarks about the letter of mine you printed. In regard to Gibbs: Olson's thoughts about what a magazine should do and be are set forth in letters to Cid Corman in the early fifties and collected in Letters To Origin. In those letters Olson constantly urges Corman to print the most intellectually alive material he can get his hands on, no matter where it comes from or its "form" - in regard to Gibbs' "South Wales isn't California" I can say that Caterpillar most assuredly was not California either. The magazine was started in New York City in 1967 and the first 12 issues were edited there (A Caterpillar Anthology, Doubleday-Anchor, NYC 1971, collects about 500 pages of material from these first 12 issues). In 1970 I took a teaching job in the Los Angeles area and the last 8 issues were edited in my apartment in Sherman Oaks. Being in California, and especially in the Los Angeles area, had nothing to do with the material I chose to publish. Other than Gary Snyder's long piece of reportage on India (which was written in Kyoto, 1962) in Caterpillar 19, there must be not more than 50 pages of work by various authors living in California spread out over the last 8 issues which averaged around 150 pages each). In regard to Jay: he has apparently not read Caterpillar anymore carefully than Gibbs or he would know better than to refer to it as "a magazine plugging one group of writers." In 20 issues 168 poets and artists appeared in Caterpillar. It is true that of this 168, 8 or 10 poets appeared regularly in the magazine; they gave the magazine a center and a basis against which to read work by lesser known people. However, to think of Robert Duncan, Frank Samperi, Gary Snyder, Diane Wakoski, Cid Corman, Fielding Dawson, Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin, as a "group" is absurd: certainly one can find compatibilities between some of these people but there are profound disagreements between some of them as well as to what the function of art should be, of what is poetry and what is not.

I too along with Jay dislike dogmatism but I dislike eclecticism
even more, and I think that what is back of Jay's otherwise mean-
ingless complaint about Caterpillar is a resistance to the complexity
of the magazine - and its refusal to provide diversion, like cartoons
or chit-chat and news about every small press item received.

I believe that we live in an age in which entertainment more and
more presents itself as art; much of Caterpillar's seriousness
existed in its continual attempt to present that writing which I
considered to be art, to keep (in Blake's words) the divine vision
in a time of trouble.

So the point of contention between my point of view and that
attributed to me and expressed by Gibbs and Jay is NOT one of a
group and/or place oriented magazine versus a magazine open to
differing kinds of expression international as well as local. To
make the argument on such grounds is to overlook a great deal of
what Caterpillar in its 20 issues did achieve.

                                                                  Clayton Eshleman.