Letter from the Editor: New Voices
Jonah Raskin
I’m a newcomer to this publication and directly responsible for some of the non-fiction pieces that appear in the current issue. I‘m not a newcomer to newspapers, magazines, writing, and editing. I started out as a sports reporter in the 1950s, and from an early age regarded the novel as the most perfect literary form. I’m also attached to non-fiction narratives and poetry.
In October, Christopher Bernard and I divided up T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and read it aloud to a rowdy crowd at Simple Pleasures Cafe in San Francisco. I’ve met Ho Lin and some of the contributors to Caveat Lector at the luncheons we’ve enjoyed at the Park Chalet in shouting distance of the Pacific. I have read and reread the poems submitted for the current issue, not with an eye to content, but to form, language, and the arrangement of words on the page. I like the images that accompany the texts and have noticed that they complement and enhance one another. Bernard’s poem pleased me because at the end it returns to the beginning. For those who submitted audio texts, I listened to the delivery and the pacing. I learned that I appreciate white space and pauses; they invite the eye and the ear into the work. I noticed, too, how much poets rely on the word “like.” I know I have, though I also try not to use it. It seems to get in the way of flow but it can’t be abolished.
Reading and rereading the poems, I also found that I appreciate paradox and the elevation of the mundane; transforming the ordinary into something special. When a poem presents itself as difficult, as in D. G. Zorich’s work, I spend more time with it than with a poem that I “get” on first reading, or think I get. I’m often drawn into a poem when there’s repetition of key words—“snow,” “wind,” and “trees”— in Jane Barrett Ross’s “From My Window.” I prefer the use of the first person pronoun “I” rather than the second person pronoun “you.” These might be prejudices. I don’t regard them as hard and fast rules.
I solicited work from Sarah Baker, a jazz and blues singer and a songwriter, and also from Michelle Sterling, who is part of a writing group I belong to. Baker comes from a corner of the U.S. – rural Christian Tennessee —that has not yielded many writers, but I wanted to hear about it from an insider who got out. Sterling writes of a world – in her case Haiti— that I know little about. Her descriptions of landscapes, sea and sky are in my view truly memorable. For this issue, I have not submitted anything for publication other than my introduction. It’s enough. Glad to get to know the contributors through their writing. Pleased to meet you.
-- Jonah Raskin
Jonah Raskin is a co-editor of Caveat Lector. A poet and a novelist, he lives in San Francisco. His books include The Mythology of Imperialism: Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Joyce Cary, and its companion, A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature.
Image: "Lively Gray Whale Cove beach - Pacific Ocean south of San Francisco, California, USA" by Wonderlane is licensed under CC BY 2.0.