Time and The Rumpus

On retirement?

It was a good run, better and longer than I could have imagined, and yet I’m still somehow surprised that it’s over. I thought I’d be the one to turn off the lights. 

Sorry, I’m not trying to be cryptic here. About a month ago, I guess, I changed my bio on the few places online where I post. I added a “Ret.” to “Senior Poetry Editor at The Rumpus.” I considered changing it “Emeritus” but that’s too academic both for The Rumpus and for me. Retired is the appropriate term.

The newly retired editor in nature

I was with The Rumpus almost from the beginning. It was December 2008 and Amy and I were back in San Francisco for the first time since we’d moved away 3 years before. Amy had an interview at MLA and I met up from some old friends from my time as a Stegner and they told me I should meet a bunch of them later at a bar in the Mission to talk about this online magazine Stephen Elliott was starting because they were looking for someone to write about poetry occasionally.

I’d blogged about politics for Stephen’s personal website in the run up to the 2004 election, and had read with him at the Stanford Bookstore, which was also the first and only time I ever appeared on BookTV. So I showed up. I mostly talked to Andrew Altschul about it that night, as I recall, though most of the time I was there I caught up with other friends. I got an email a couple of days later asking if I would write a weekly links column for the blog, I said yes, and I got an email address and a login/password to the site.

We went live for real on January 20, 2009. Kind of a slow news day as I recall, though there was a bit of controversy on the internet about a poem by Elizabeth Alexander read during a ceremony that morning, a controversy that required (not really) a response from the new poetry columnist at this website that had just gone live. 

So that was the first thing I wrote for The Rumpus. Not a column of links, though many of those would follow. Nope, I wrote a response to the reaction to Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration, “Praise Song for the Day.” (I didn’t even have to look that up.) I dug up the poem Robert Frost actually wrote for JFK’s inauguration (which is just goddamn terrible) as opposed to The Gift Outright, which he recited when the wind blew his papers all over the place. I looked back at the offerings from Maya Angelou and Miller Williams (who was one of my professors at Arkansas where I did my MFA) and came to the rousing conclusion that, as inaugural poems go, Alexander’s was pretty good, given the competition, and was certainly poetry no matter what some Impressive Critics had claimed.

It was published as the top story on the site for a little while. Maybe a day? Nothing stayed at the top for long in those days. And I have no idea how many people read it. But a day or two after that, I got an email from Stephen asking me if I wanted to be poetry editor instead of just a columnist. I’d be responsible for soliciting and editing book reviews and occasional essays and I’d still have my column and no we wouldn’t be publishing poetry yet but keep it in mind.

I almost said no. Seriously, I was torn about this. I’d never edited anything before, I’d never written a book review, much less solicited one. I had no idea how I’d even get books to reviewers. I’d never even heard of an ARC. So I mentioned it to Amy and she was like “Of course you have to do it are you nuts?” 

So I did.

I learned on the job. I put out calls on this newish thing called social media for reviewers and learned that most presses would gladly send you or your reviewers copies of books, ARCs or finished copies or both just in hopes of getting some coverage. I learned how to format stuff on Wordpress. I read lots of other literary blogs and occasionally argued with people in the comment sections. I also learned that comment sections are both poisonous and overrated and sometimes it’s not worth the increase in traffic to have them.

The Rumpus table at our first ever AWP in 2011, Washington DC

We added things along the way. We started a National Poetry Month Poem-A-Day program and we published so much great poetry from amazing writers who trusted us with it. We started the essay series that is kind of the inspiration for this place, “The Last Book I Loved,” which spawned “The Last Poem I Loved.”

And we started The Rumpus Poetry Book Club. If I have any kind of legacy, I hope it’s for that. 

The book club started with three of us, Camille Dungy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and me. We would take turns choosing a book, writing a short essay about why we’d chosen it, and then lead both the online discussion with members and the interview with the author at the end of the month. Camille chose the first one, Shane Book’s Ceiling of Sticks. Gaby chose Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation the following month and I chose, serendipitously enough, Elizabeth Alexander’s Crave Radiance Selected Poems 1990-2010. 

We worked that way for a few years, but other responsibilities drew Camille and Gaby away and eventually it was just me. Often I chose the books, but when the site was sold first to Marisa Siegel and then again to Alyson Sinclair, I had less input on what books we selected. But that was fine, and here’s why.

From the moment I took the job as poetry editor, I was concerned that I would let my taste in poems and poets dominate the coverage, and I knew that my experience was narrow. My MFA was from Arkansas, a school known for formalism and New Criticism, and until Davis McCombs joined the faculty in my last year, our reading lists were not filled with contemporaries. I’d gotten a taste of how much I didn’t know during my time at Stanford, but even then I didn’t really understand just how much the internet had allowed for an explosion of experimentation and cross-cultural communication in poetry. 

I knew that I didn’t want the poetry section to just be stuff I liked, that I wanted us to provide space for voices that were wildly different from my own in style and experience. I wanted to read poems and books that didn’t assume my demographic was the primary audience. But also, I didn’t really trust myself to not slip into just reading what was comfortable for me, so when Marisa and Alyson took over the book selection, that meant my primary job was finding ways to talk with the authors about things that might make me uncomfortable. 

But that’s the gig, as I see it. When I first started as poetry editor, some people online said things like “I want difficult poems that make me work to understand them,” and I agreed, but it turned out they had a specific definition of difficult meant, and it didn’t always include multi-lingual work or poems about sexual assault or racism or queerness or disability or other subjects that can make a reader like me feel uncomfortable. And I like to think I mostly did okay with it. 

The original Write Like a Motherfucker mug in front of a manual typewriter

The Poetry Book Club ended earlier this year. The final book we talked about was Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives, a book I heartily recommend. We ended with 14 years, 2 months worth of books, which is 160 books if I did the math right. (Edit: I didn’t do the math right. It’s 170 books.) I’ve talked to so many brilliant writers over the years, met more than a few at AWP and elsewhere, sipped drinks and shook hands and hugged their necks when they let me. I’ll always feel like I got away with something, given how much I took from the experience.

I want to thank some people I was lucky to work with during my time there, and this isn’t everyone by a long shot but: Isaac Fitzgerald, Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, Camille Dungy and Gabrielle Calvocoressi all made my life so much richer just by letting me get to know them a bit. Cortney Lamar Charleston and Carolina Ebeid were the ones who expanded Rumpus Original Poetry into what I had always hoped it could become and I’m so proud to have been associated with their work. Molly Spencer was one of my first co-editors and helped me realize that it was okay to offload some of the work I was trying to do. Marisa Siegel kept The Rumpus alive when it easily could have died.

And finally, Alyson Sinclair, who has fought to get The Rumpus on a more stable financial footing while refusing to compromise on the quality of the work they publish. Alyson and some of the other Rumpus folk are still trying to recover from Hurricane Helene, as I mentioned in an earlier post, so if you can lend a hand, it’ll mean the world to me. Here’s information on where you can do that.

I’ll always feel like a part of The Rumpus, even if I don’t have an email address there anymore, and not just when I’m drinking coffee from my multiple Write Like a Motherfucker mugs. 

Thanks as always for reading. If you’re someone who’s been touched by The Rumpus over the years, I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.