*Originally Published in The Pierian #2* Influence and longevity are not synonymous for literary journals. It’s hard to think of a journal with more meteoric impact than *The Egoist*, named in honor of Fredrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of the individual. During its short five-year run between 1914 and 1919, founding editor Dora Marsden advanced a new vision for literature, publishing James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, H.D., Marianne Moore, Charlotte Mew, and Ezra Pound. The poets and writers published were not professors; some lived hand-to-mouth. The editor’s own qualification was a college degree and a stint in jail for peaceful protesting. She was a feminist, and for her, the next step in advancing women’s liberty was in the realm of language. #@callout “Our war is with words and in their every aspect: grammar, accidence, syntax: body, blood, and bone." We credit William Carlos Williams for the Modernist credo “no idea but in things,” his call for poetry to ground itself in image and discard flowery language. But it was Dora Marsden, not Williams, who first declared war on hollow verbiage. In a 1915 essay, “I Am” (*The Egoist* vol. 2, no. 1), Marsden declares: “Our war is with words and in their every aspect: grammar, accidence, syntax: body, blood, and bone." She argues language presently functions to oppress, not express: “words have developed into a ‘Culture’ and grown masters of all and servants of none.” The magazine debuted with the subtitles “An individualist Review” and “Formerly the New Freewoman,” on the first day of the year 1914. The premier issue opened with Marsden’s invective against the English state as hypocritical and repressive, consisting of conceptual “veils,” such as Liberty and Democracy, that are “feeble and faded.” In retrospect, on the eve of World War I, with democracies prepared to ship innumerable young men to the slaughter, her essay feels prophetic. The poetry of the debut issue likewise foretells things to come, despite F.S. Flint’s forgettable effort. Flint’s free verse feels weak beside the existing superstructure of formal meter: @excerpt{ London, my beautiful is not the sunset nor the pale green sky simmering through the curtain [...] } Compare it to Landor’s appeal to sentiment a generation earlier (e.g., “Late Leaves”): @excerpt{ The leaves are falling; so am I; The few late flowers have moisture in the eye; @tab@tabSo have I too. Scarcely on any bough is heard Joyous, or even unjoyous, bird @tab@tabThe whole wood through. } The Victorian could employ iambic variation as a chiaroscuro to complicate what would otherwise register as cliché. Flint also approaches sentiments that are hardly particular to him and are intended to express a common feeling. But his free-verse, by comparison, lies flat on the page. Modernism would eventually shatter the idea of an easy unity of feeling among what the Victorians would deem “civilized” people. But Marsden would need fiercer soldiers to further her attack on civilization’s myths and deceptions. William Carlos Williams took his best shot in issue number six, put to press March 16th. “The Wanderer: A Rococo Study” is also a city portrait, but it disposes of Flint’s expectation of unity by alluding to, and attempting to dismantle, Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”. The four-part poem asks the question under its “Advent” section (the “she” here is a vision of a “young crow” introduced in the preceding stanza): @excerpt{ But one day crossing the ferry With the great towers of Manhattan before me, Out at the prow with the sea-wind blowing I had been wearying many questions Which she had put on to try me: How shall I be a mirror to this modernity? } Williams has injected himself into the Whitman role of interpreter and medium of his age, attempting to form a poetry that would speak for the broadest possible cross-section of America (and indeed, in this instance, beyond). But according to Marsden’s high Nietzschean standard, it would not be enough to simply echo America’s free-verse everyman. Williams would have to overcome him. That would have to wait, as Williams stumbles over his feminine endings and endline assonance, unable to sharpen his imagery into the gemlike clarity he accomplishes later in *Spring and All*. Marsden’s tenure at the helm of *The Egoist* was brief, and her last issue as head editor would be June 15th. (It’s possible she required more time to care for her sick mother in Southport.) That issue continues the serialization of James Joyce’s *A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man*, started in February, and turns *The Times Literary Supplement* into a source of comedy by quoting its pretentiousness out of context as “Revelations:” “Poetry in Germany has a very ancient history;” “For too many people the cooking of breakfast in the early morning is peevish work;” and “The book is worthy of its publishers.” In later issues, Marsden would continue to pen editorials on women’s suffrage but would no longer focus on the exhausting task of preparing manuscript for publication twice per month. Indeed, Harriet Shaw Weaver, her successor and a crucial patron of the magazine, reduced the frequency to monthly, granting herself and her staff more time to secure and copyedit material between issues. As the focus of the magazine continued to shift from politics to letters, quality over quantity proved exceedingly wise. #@callout In later issues, Marsden would continue to pen editorials on women’s suffrage but would no longer focus on the exhausting task of preparing manuscript for publication Ironically, Dora Marsden created a platform for some men whose work and lives didn’t align with her values. To call Eliot and Pound “chauvinists” is certainly warranted—Eliot in his penchant for circulating offensive doggerel, and Pound for advancing fascism, with its cold scorn for female agency. But maybe that is too much of a 21th-century concern. We are the ones who feel a need to assign such labels to public personas. Marsden had no such compunction. Her goal was to liberate language, and by any measure, she succeeded. %%SECTIONBREAK%% *Ploughshares*, one of the most influential journals founded in the late 20th century, also carried a whiff of insurrection, thanks to its origins in Irish Boston. In 1971, DeWitt Henry, then an aspiring novelist, Harvard grad, and Iowa Writers Workshop alumnus, partnered with the publican of a Cambridge pub, Irish émigré Peter O’Malley. They named the magazine for the bar, the Plough and Stars, in tribute to the Seán O'Casey play of the same name. The play, dramatizing events of the 1916 Easter Rising, had inspired a riot at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, in 1926. #@callout They named the magazine for the bar, the Plough and Stars, in tribute to the Seán O'Casey play of the same name. The contemporary Troubles in Northern Ireland eerily presaged Boston’s own difficulties with school integration in the wake of the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965, ratified by the Massuchesetts statehouse, that recognized Boston’s de facto school segregation as unconstitutional. When the Boston School Committee stonewalled Black families and refused to integrate, civil rights leaders organized, protested, and took legal action. Court-ordered bussing ensued in the ʼ70’s, resisted by counterprotests, racial violence, and rioting. Meanwhile, expatriate Irish nationalism found odd bedfellows with communists, artists, activists, and the radical intellectual vanguard. Once again, the undercurrents of anti-establishment politics combined explosively with shifting tides in aesthetics. High Modernism had become moribund. A new path forward was called for. The debut issue was heavily Celtic in flavor, featuring Dublin poets Hugh Maxton, Hayden Murphy, and Thomas Redshaw. Boston talent was distinguished by Tom Lux, Sidney Goldfarb, William Corbett, and George Kimball. However, it is Anne Waldman’s Catullan masterpiece, “Sophisticated Poem,” that best captures the young-people energy of a brand-new enterprise: “2 words / fucking / & sucking.” *Ploughshares* seized the day, ingesting and metabolizing the shift in literary power happening all around it. Harvard University had produced a generation of America’s major male poets (and they were only men; Harvard did not enroll women until 1977), such as W.S. Merwin, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, Donald Hall, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara. But rival centers of power were emerging, including in New York and San Francisco. Increasingly, Harvard wasn’t the sole gatekeeper, as Iowa Writers Workshop supplanted it as the ticket to agents and book deals. The workshop model was toppling the traditional power dynamic of the lecture and seminar. At Iowa, the poets were teaching one another. Poets of the Vietnam era, brimming with suspicion at institutional authority, looked to create a literary culture that subverted it. Henry and O’Malley’s inspired act of rebellion was to enforce a policy of rotating editors—a nod to their communistic ideals. They recruited volunteer staff editors to read submissions and canvass their contacts for material, but prospective writers could not predict who would have the final say. This decision to collectivize editorial effort while eliminating any permanent editorial authority proved seminal. #@callout Henry and O’Malley’s inspired act of rebellion was to enforce a policy of rotating editors—a nod to their communistic ideals. Over the next three years, they infused the Harvard Yard milieu with new blood via James Tate, William Meredith, Charles Wright, Susan Howe, William Dickey, Andre Dubus II, Raymond Carver, Anthony Hecht, Robert Pinsky, Elizabeth Bishop, Maxine Kumin, James Merrill, Mark Strand, and Sam Cornish. But Harvard talent was featured, too, including a mix of stalwarts and new faces, such Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Frank Bidart, Jonathan Aaron, Peter Davison, and Helen Vendler. From the beginning, *Ploughshares* cultivated a cosmopolitan intelligence, plucking superb translations of Mahmoud Darwish, Octavio Paz, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and Eugenio Montale. Unlike *The Egoist*, *Ploughshares*, with its swirl of guest editors and teeming anthill of industrious staff, had no stated ideology. Because so many of its early contributors indeed doubled as staff, the journal provided a natural way for young poets to make connections. Just as Dora Marsden’s feminism provided a critical spark to Modernism, Peter O’Malley’s Irish-Americanism touched off a chain reaction. But what, exactly, was the movement *Ploughshares* contributed to? Certainly, surrealism, postmodernism, and post-confessionalism filtered through those early issues, with poems that point toward things to come from Tate, Lux, Pinsky, Wright, and Howe. American verse would increasingly specialize in minor revelation and personal crises, revisiting French Symbolism and Beat poetry with an eye to more refined and exacting surrealism. But that was merely the water that ran under its bridge. Ploughshares published the best poetry it could get its hands on, according to whatever criteria made sense at the time. No guest editor could meaningfully shape the staff’s practices, never mind hire or fire. Power devolved to the staff, who out of necessity took a utilitarian stance, absent any other. Its guiding star would not be Nietzsche’s continental egoism but John Dewey’s American pragmatism. #@callout No guest editor could meaningfully shape the staff’s practices, never mind hire or fire. Power devolved to the staff *Ploughshares*’ ideals were vague enough that its submitters and editors could project whatever they wished for literature onto it—especially if what they wanted was their own importance. The journal was supposedly taste-agnostic, and thus theoretically a neutral arbiter. This appearance of impartiality made it a sought-after academic credential, and an ideal clearinghouse for American literary pedigree. Henry and O’Malley were consistent, turning out issue after issue of the best writers in America for the better part of two decades. Rather than wage war against the existing system, they subsumed it. The *Ploughshares* star continued to rise as MFA programs popped up all over the country, looking to hire faculty with the right publications to their names. Henry himself took a post at Emerson College teaching Creative Writing in 1984 and threw himself into the work of building up the program. (I received my MFA from Emerson College in 2004.) Henry secured tenure in 1989 and assumed the departmental chair. According to his memoir, *Endings and Beginnings* (MadHat Press, 2021), Henry pitched the college on the merits of acquiring *Ploughshares*, and O’Malley sold his share of the *Plough* to the college for an undisclosed sum, leaving Henry lone captain. Going into a departmental meeting to renew his chairmanship, Henry assumed the vote would be a formality. “I had accomplished miracles in hiring, in curriculum, and in enrollments, to everyone’s benefit. If there were soreheads in my fold, I had them well outnumbered…” He had miscalculated. The engine of meritocracy that Henry had so assiduously oiled was too important for any one man to control, and perhaps his colleagues sensed that. “At this point, 5-4, my faculty voted against my renewal as department chair...I was also forced to surrender any real role in *Ploughshares* as my protege took full control.” Don Lee took the helm at Ploughshares and continued to run it in much the same manner, with guest-star editors promoting the title while throwing readers off any particular aesthetic scent. But the journal had already served its purpose. It had wrested away Harvard University’s exclusive right to knight poets. Going forward, that would have to be done by committee, one safely institutionalized just across the river from the Plough and Stars. %%SECTIONBREAK%% Like Marsden, Henry, and O’Malley, young poets and writers today are also frustrated by the literary establishment’s inability to connect with and respond to the political moment. They want journals to stake their reputations against local and global injustices, and they call for existing institutional structures to be swept aside, even if they’re not exactly sure what to replace them with. In June of 2020, the board of the Poetry Foundation, *Poetry*’s institutional backer, resigned in the wake of the George Floyd killing. The final straw was a petition signed by thousands online that stated, in part, “we dream of a world in which the massive wealth hoarding that underlies the foundation’s work would be replaced by the redistribution of every cent to those whose labor amassed those funds.” Similar activism precipitated the implosion of the online journal *Guernica*, due to its decision to run a piece about the Gaza war from an Israeli perspective. No literary journal today, however big or small, has much influence on public policy. The people who read it may be swayed by its contents, but are unlikely to rise to action. Its poems and stories, no matter how affecting, lie far downstream from the political energies that first inspired its founders. Today’s journals can only offer words, and the professors in charge of them—as most of these journals are run by academics—must fill their calendars not with freedom fighting but with departmental meetings. #@callout Its poems and stories, no matter how affecting, lie far downstream from the political energies that first inspired its founders. Zadie Smith, novelist and professor of Creative Writing at NYU, was recently asked by Ezra Klein about our era’s fixation on language, terminology, and politically correct speech (“Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones,” *New York Times*, 9/17/24). She replied: @excerpt{ It was a linguistic turn mostly on the part of young people. But how can you blame them? Given that they had no money, really, no tools, very little physical, material freedoms in the world, it seems natural to me that they fought in the only place they knew where to fight, which was language. The actual means of production are out of their hands. } Certainly, some young people *do* have money and *do* have tools—the freshman class’s age at Harvard and NYU is still well under 30, and in aggregate suffers no lack of financial resources. It’s not the young or the poor who are paying lip-service. Revisit any issue of *The Egoist* and there can be no doubt what the journal’s goals were. It fought a war, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, against conditionalized thought. The same cannot be said of *Ploughshares*. Its 18-year independent run was not a struggle over language, but who should own the means of producing it. Today, with print-on-demand and Web publishing requiring little or no capital, it doesn’t take a lot of money and tools to get started. And many do. But a small number of elite journals maintain an effective monopoly on producing the literary credentials required to build a career and make money in the field. That is a monopoly of the means of production that Marsden would surely recognize as no less hypocritical than any of the others maintained for the advantage of the few at the expense of the many. Ploughshares’ first issue contained a poem by Tom Lux entitled “The Cave or The Mine.” In 1971, Lux’s signature lineation—enjambing nearly everything and fracturing phrases at arbitrary parts of speech—could likely still raise an eyebrow. Now, in the hands of a thousand pale imitators, the technique is more often a triumph of style over substance, of eye over ear. But here, it plays toward the speluncaphobia of the piece: @excerpt{ @tab@tab@tab[...] No matter where you are you can drop to your knees and hear the damp invitations, the buzzing of a hollow, silent place. You'd rather think of it as a mine. Men go down in mines, they come up, they go down again. Caves are slightly different. Some caves have never been visited. There is something uncertain about caves. But you can't stop the person underground who is always fol- lowing you. You can't stop a buried shadow. [...] } As the “you” of the poem becomes aware of a Dantean world below and its mysterious shadow figure, the poem toys with an ambiguity—is it a cave, like Plato’s, perhaps, containing a fire? Or is it a mine, in which the industrious toil in search of value? Lux never intended to do so, but I can’t help but seize the dichotomy he presents as not merely an *ars poetica*, but also as two models for the collective act of literary production. The mine and the cave may at first seem similar as we go about our business above them. But if we stop to listen carefully, ear to the earth, they couldn’t be more different. A cave conjures our most primitive origins, and in the philosophical context, it holds possibilities of both deception and enlightenment. By contrast, a mine is a place where resources, both human and natural, are exploited until they are all used up.

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