Best of the Sucks: High-Octane Poetix from the Legendary Toad Suck Review, ed. Mark Spitzer

 

THE GHOSTS OF ANNE BOLEYN

Convicted of fucking in Greenwich

when she sat, only inwardly mutinous,

by Henry’s side three miles distant,

it should come as no surprise that Anne,

now relieved of physical limits, flickers

wickless in a coach drawn by headless

horses all the way to Blickling even

as she skims towerwards on Thames,

skips poltergeist in shoe shop on day

of execution. Every year since 1538,

she’s frissoned as if by magic sword

trick. Now many queens, more fertile

than Henry could ever need, she flirts

in empty bonnet. Skirts, once garnet,

are blood clot, even looser than accused

in places she’d never been. (Brenda Mann Hammack)

Recently, a copy of the anthology Best of the Sucks: High-Octane Poetix from the Legendary Toad Suck Review (Cheshire MA: MadHat Press, 2022), edited by writer and translator Mark Spitzer, an anthology pulled from the six volumes of the annual Toad Suck Review (2009-2015). As Spitzer offers in his “FROM THE TOADSTOOL: PREFACE TO A NEW TOAD ERA”:

Back in 2008 I was an assistant professor of writing at the University of Central Arkansas where my dean desired a national literary journal for the college. So I went to him and proposed publishing a print version of an already established literary journal that was only online at the time. Having worked as an editor of Exquisite Corpse for nearly a decade, and knowing that I could coordinate a deal between my university and said journal’s ed in chief, I threw in the incentive of writing a proposal for an MFA program in creative writing which the dean also wanted. Then Whamo! It was on.

[…]

Hence, we settled on the title of Toad Suck Review, named for the region of Central Arkansas where UCA is located. And so “The Transitional Issue” exploded on the scene. Toad Suck Review #1 included work by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, CD Wright, Xaviera Hollander, Jacques Prévet, Lyn Lifshin, Kevin Brockmeier, David Gessner, Davis Schneiderman and an electric, eclectic host of other vibrant voices. We debuted our “High-Octane Poetics” section along with fiction and nonfiction, but we also focused on literary translation, Arkansas-specific authors, environmental literature, artwork, reviews and critical/scholarly work. And as all this went on, we held bandfest fundraisers, sponsored readings, had a presence at national conferences and created a major buzz.

Anyone who knows me already knows I’m a big fan of these sorts of archival projects, from the ongoing interviews I’ve been doing with current and former editors/publishers of small press and journals to the fact that I’m currently building the latest ‘best of’ anthology of above/ground press, covering the press’ third decade of publication. There is something of this currently anthology that reminds me of The Angel Hair Anthology (New York NY: Granary Books, 2001), edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh, a book that covered a period of Angel Hair magazine and books produced between 1966 and 1978: with the arrival of each anthology on my doorstep, they each provided me an introduction to an entire range of publishing (albeit with scores of familiar names) I hadn’t been aware of. I don’t think it unreasonable to have not heard of either, as few copies of either Angel Hair nor Toad Suck Review most likely managed to make their way north of the border. The two hundred-plus pages of the anthology give a sense of both the locality and the urgency of the journal, working to reach beyond the borders of their immediate to connect a community of writing and writers well beyond into other parts of the country. There’s a vibrancy to the poets, from early work to the late Matthew Henriksen (a poet who died earlier this year, obviously after the book had gone through production) and Jericho Brown to local favourites such as Michael Anania, CD Wright, Jack Collom and Frank Stanford, and American poets well-established by that point, including Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman and Lew Welch (the book does seem to be particularly male-heavy, which is worth noting). There are places where the design of the collection does seem a bit compact, a bit squished, but there is something, also, of the assemblage akin to collage, seeming all over the place—poems and  prose to interviews and essays—suggesting the journal existed in much the same manner, offering a kind of curated literary catch-all, with no one contributor lifted higher than any other, and there’s something energizing in that, something purely democratic. The anthology includes mounds of poetry from an array of poets both new and established, an essay by Amiri Baraka, “WHY MOST POETRY IS SO BORING AGAIN,” Lew Welch’s ‘LANGUAGE IS SPEECH,” as well as interviews with Anne Waldman, Davis Schneiderman, Jericho Brown and CD Wright. This collection offers a rather intriguing portrait of a period of time in American poetry, as seen and curated from Arkansas, a geography not as much on the radar as perhaps it should be. As Wright’s interview ends:

Fayetteville was a place with its moment. There was more than a critical mass of artists from different media living there in the early seventies. We were all burning, none more brightly than Frank Stanford. We were all holdovers from the struggles of Civil Rights, Vietnam War; emerging partisans of the Women’s Movement. Making a little art in the Ozarks, yeah, that seemed like a fertile and protected setting. Reagan was temporarily confined to California. We had all graduated from our at least attended the University of Arkansas. The town was inexpensive and cohesive. The death of Frank Stanford should not be designated the only catalyst for that diaspora, but his tragic early death was a strong, painful signal that our time there was up. Many of us moved to the cities—New Orleans, Houston, San Francisco and Los Angeles were the primary urban destinations. A few hardy artists stayed on and succeeded in making an independent creative living, but the rest of us had to find another way forward. College towns have that in common. They shed their former students. This one bound us together for longer than many, but it was just not large enough to employ artists in any special numbers. But among the artists I most admire, Fayetteville is where they were conentrated then.