Inspiration
can be found in the most ordinary of places. Even if one has never lived
on a farm or set foot in a farmhouse, editor Mike Dell'Aquila's description of
the location where he sought refuge during college will no doubt strike a
chord. A cofounder of Farmhouse
Magazine, Dell'Aquila would escape the
crowds at Penn State University, where he earned an English degree a few years
ago, by joining friends around a small Formica table in the wood-paneled living
room of a pal's old brick farmhouse. It obviously wasn't the decor that was so
influential, but rather the atmosphere. According to a note on the journal's
Web site, for Dell'Aquila and his friends "the farmhouse offered freedom from
the labels and expectations of the day-to-day world," where "they were free to
express their individual personalities and unique points of view. Marathon
conversations that ranged from serious to outrageous topics were the norm,
along with the belief that [the group was] capable of making a lasting
contribution to their world." That contribution took the form of Farmhouse Magazine, an
online journal that Dell'Aquila and his wife and fellow Penn State alum, Sarah,
launched in the summer of 2005 to try to recapture that inspirational time and
place. In November the journal published its first print volume, The Best of Farmhouse Magazine
2005-2008, featuring nearly two hundred pages of work by poets
Rosemary Ann Davis and Faith Gabel, fiction writers Joseph Riippi and Chelsea
Sutton, essayist Katie Schwartz, and many others. Would-be submitters who want
to join others in the Farmhouse
can find submission guidelines online.
Plenty
of literary magazines publish topical issues featuring work that focuses on a
current event or a popular social or political debate. Some recent examples
that come to mind include the "China Issue" of the Atlanta Review, which was
published last spring to correspond with the Beijing Olympics; "The Political
Future" issue of Tin House, which hit bookstores last fall, for obvious
reasons; and "The War at Home" issue of the Virginia
Quarterly Review, also published last fall. But
there may be no literary magazine whose very existence is more directly tied to
current events than Poems Against
War. The first issue of the annual
journal, edited by Gregg Mosson in Baltimore, was released in May 2003, just
two months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The initial print run of a hundred
copies quickly sold out. While Poems
Against War is not affiliated with Poets
Against War, a growing online anthology
of poems that sprang from former Copper Canyon Press editor Sam Hamill's
response to Operation Iraqi Freedom, as it would come to be known, Mosson's
journal is nevertheless inspired by Hamill's rallying cry. (In February 2003,
Laura Bush invited a number of writers, including Hamill, to a White House
symposium about the works of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston
Hughes; Hamill declined the invitation and called upon others to submit poems
opposing the case for war that was then being built by Bush and Cheney. Fifteen
hundred poets responded in four days, and the Poets
Against War Web site was launched to handle the flood of
submissions; it currently features more than twenty thousand poems.) Whereas
Hamill's is a pretty slick operation, Mosson's journal is more of a
low-to-the-ground, do-it-yourself enterprise. In fact, the journal is published
by Wasteland Press, a self-publishing company in Shelbyville, Kentucky, and is
always open to submissions. The seventh issue, carrying a theme of "Ars
Poetica," was published last August and features the work of Antler, Alan
Barysh, Tony Hoagland, Patric Pepper, and others. Perhaps the event that fueled
the launch of Mosson's journal—and Hamill's anthology—will soon end, but even
the most hopeful editors realize change doesn't happen that quickly, and so the
poems keep coming.
Kevin Larimer is the
deputy editor of Poets
& Writers Magazine.
