Call Number:

Ms. Coll. 349

Repository:

University of Pennsylvania: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts

Extent:

217 boxes

Language:

English

Preferred Citation:

American Poetry Review records, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania

Date:

1971-1998 (inclusive)

Creator:

American Poetry Review

Form:

Audiovisual materials, Photographs, Financial records, Correspondence, Manuscripts for publication, and Manuscripts, American -- 20th century

Abstract:

The collection primarily comprises the editorial files maintained on each contributor to the journal. Included in these files are correspondence between the authors, translaters, and editors of APR, manuscripts submitted for publication, galleys corrected by the authors and editors, and editors' votes and comments on submitted manuscripts. Other series include a small section of administrative correspondence, financial records from 1972-1980, photographs of the writers whose work has been published in APR (many of which may be viewed online), and an incomplete run of the periodical.

The American Poetry Review was founded in 1972 in Philadelphia by poets Stephen Berg and Stephen Parker. Innovative in concept and in its newsprint/tabloid format, the magazine aimed to reach the largest possible audience by publishing the best contemporary poetry, fiction, essays, and translations. The first issue, published in November/December 1972, featured translations from Pablo Neruda's The Captain's Verses by Donald D. Walsh and translations of Cesar Vallejo by David Smith. There were poems by Allen Ginsberg, C. K. Williams, Philip Levine, Louis Simpson, Marvin Bell, Richard Wilbur, Donald Justice, and David Ignatow (also an associate editor of the journal) and essays, columns, and book reviews by Joyce Carol Oates, Diane Wakoski, Donald Hall, and Richard Howard; plus the first in a series on Poetry in the Classroom by Denise Levertov. The issue was 48 pages long and received enthusiastic letters of endorsement from poets and other subsc ribers, some of which are preserved in this collection.

With wide support and praise from the poetry community but no capital, the magazine struggled financially during its early years. The American Poetry Review was housed, at no charge, in a small room at the Jewish Ys and Centers of Greater Philadelphia YM-YWHA Branch at Broad and Pine streets and the editors worked without pay. After several years of scraping together resources to produce the magazine, the magazine's situation began to improve in the mid-1970s. In December 1975 APR/World Poetry Inc. was granted nonprofit, tax-exempt status. During the summer of 1976 the magazine moved to a larger office donated by Temple University Center City at 1616 Walnut Street and that fall launched a successful advertising and direct mail campaign which doubled its subscription list from 6,000 to 12,000 subscribers within a year. Over the next few years APR received grant support from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Dietrich Foundation while increasing its subscriptions, advertising, and store sales which account for the majority of its income.

The magazine is bi-monthly, published six times a year by World Poetry, Inc. One of the keys to its success from the beginning has been national distribution. By the late 1970s The American Poetry Review was recognized thro ughout North America and internationally as the place where many contemporary poets would first wish their work to appear. The journal was flooded with submissions, still operating with a small editorial staff working for minimal salaries. The journal fea tured special supplements, expanding to 56 pages, to accommodate some of these submissions and to provide space for publishing long poems or long essays and interviews, formats which are not common or possible in many small press publications.

In February of 1977 the New York Times and the local press ran stories about an accusatory "manifesto" charging APR with bias against minorities and women. This "Statement on the Editorial Policy of The American Poetry Review" was signed by June Jordan, Adrienne Rich (both contributors to APR) and others seeking to increase the numbers of women and minorities published there. In response, APR maintained its policy of welc oming and reading unsolicited manuscripts, publishing the work of unknown writers, researching small press publications to discover new writers, and featuring the work and voices of many minority and women writers in the publication. Over the years, The American Poetry Review provided an ongoing forum for controversies over the inclusion of women, African-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic poets, and many such poets received serious recognition from other writers in its pages before they came to the attention of the academy or major publishing houses. An example is Marge Piercy's discussion of Audre Lorde's poetry in Piercy's inaugural column in A PR 5, no. 2 (1976). The magazine crossed disciplinary and genre boundaries, publishing essays, reviews, interviews, prose, photographs, and a significant number of translations of poetry in many languages from around the world, anticipating the move toward globalization and cultural studies in universities. A strong supporter of the poetry-in-the-schools movement, the magazine ran a series of columns, essays, and anthologies of poetry in the schools from across the United States, providing at the same time opportunities for schools to receive subscriptions to APR for classroom use.

Beginning in the 1980s APR provided services and organized events beyond the publication of the magazine. APR sponsored poetry readings by Etheridge Knight at Philadelphia prisons, by Stanley Kunitz and by C. K. Williams at the University of the Arts; workshops on play writing, acting and directing by Edward Albee; and a symposium titled "Freedom and the Poet's Responsibility to Society" held in April 1984. In 1985 with support from CIGNA, the American Poetry Review ran a Philadelphia Poets Project Workshop for teachers and students with poet Gerald Stern in the Philadelphia public high schools. In 1986 a retrospective exhibition of manuscripts from the archives of The American Poetry Review was held at the Rose nbach Museum and Library.

Through the 1990s the magazine continued to publish the work of new and established writers under current editors Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, and Arthur Vogelsang, improving the quality of its design, printing, and paper. The American Poetry Review celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with a special program on 30 April 1999 held at the Institute of Contemporary Art featuring a lifetime achievement award in poetry given to W. S. Merwin and a roundtable discussion on R 20;How Poetry Helps People to Live Their Lives" with Robert Hass, Yusef Komunyakaa, W. S. Merwin, Joyce Carol Oates, Gerald Stern, and Susan Stewart. Still based in Philadelphia at offices located at 1721 Walnut Street, the magazine's circulation ha s expanded to more than 20,000 and it continues as one of the preeminent poetry serials published in the United States. Contributors to APR include winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, and many other distinguished honors as well a s the work of poets and writers just beginning their careers. The magazine continues its mission of providing the best in contemporary writing made accessible to the widest possible audience.

The office files of The American Poetry Review which constitute the bulk of the Records at the University of Pennsylvania are comprised primarily of editorial files maintained on each contributor to the journal arranged alphabetically by author or photographer, dated from 1971 to 1998. Included in these files are correspondence between the authors and editors of APR, manuscripts submitted for publication, and galleys corrected by the authors and editors. In addition, there are the editors' votes and comments on the submitted manuscripts, in some cases these are jotted on the correspondence or on envelopes, in some cases on loose notepaper, in a few cases they comprise typed letters between members of the editorial staff. Submissions to the journal were subject to being voted on by the entire editorial staff. Where possible all of these materials are filed together for each author, arranged chronologically within folders, with the correspondence placed at the beginning of each folders. In many cases the oversize corrected galleys have been removed to Oversize Series VII. Because these files, in some cases, include manuscripts that were rejected as well as those that were accepted by APR and include revisions and corrections made by the authors, they provide essential materials for the study of the work of these writers. From the 1970s through the 1990s editors and associate editors have included Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, Jeff Moran, Stephen Parker, Ethel Rackin, Natania Rosenfeld, Rhoda Schwartz, Kathleen Sheeder, Peter Siegenthaler, Pamela Sutton, Arthur Vogelsang and Eleanor Wilner. Each of these editors has some correspondence with various contributors published in The American Poetry Review.

There is a much smaller series of administrative correspondence. This includes correspondence with small presses, literary magazines, university presses, poetry organizations, foundations, fund raisers, a few celebrities and political figures, plus national and Philadelphia arts and cultural organizations. Administrative memos circulated among the editors are arranged chronologically. There is a small selection of letters from subscribers saved from the first two years of publication, most enthusiastically endorsing the magazine. Also included are a few folders of procedures followed by interns who worked at the magazine; most of these materials date from the early 1980s.

Financial records are limited to selected records from 1972-1980 and include a set of bank records for checks drawn between 1974-1977, plus rate cards, insertion orders, and advertising invoices from about 1973-1979.

With the exception of the contributors' files which continue through 1998, and published copies of the magazine (through 2000), there are no materials in these Records documenting the activities of the organization from about 1988 through 1998.

The American Poetry Review solicited and published photographs of most of the writers whose work is included in the magazine. Although some photographs were returned to the writers or photographers, the collection includes 20 volumes of photographs of contributors, some by the well-known photographers Jill Krementz and Thomas Victor. Also included are a number of photographs taken by poets of other poets, including photos taken by William Stafford and Gerard Malanga. Many of these photographs may be viewed online.

Among the highlights of the American Poetry Review Records are early letters from Joyce Carol Oates (who wrote a series of columns for APR from 1972-1974) to editor Rhoda Schwartz, offering her enthusiasm and encouragement for the project, discussions of literature and the places she was traveling through and working in, her founding of the Ontario Review with Raymond Smith, and her reactions to the suicide of poet Anne Sexton. There are more than twenty years of correspondence between W. S. Merwin and Stephen Berg regarding Merwin's poems, prose, translations, the preservation of the tropical rain forest in Hawaii, and Dante's Purgatorio. Denise Levertov advocated for (and edited an APR Supplement of) young, mostly unpublished poets whom she felt deserved recognition in place of yet another poem by authors as well as known as herself. The magazine published a translation by Patricia Goedicke of Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio in 1982. The testimonio was a new autobiographical genre of witness to political oppression with the intention of raising consciousness. Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio has continued to be a topic of academic and political controversy well into the twenty-first century. This prescience on the part of the editors of The American Poetry Review to publish controversial materials and the documentation of the internal editorial debates regarding what should and should not be published are among the fascinating aspects of the collection.

Mention of the major writers whose work is represented in APR reads like a Who's Who. If one lists the names of 50 poets published in The American Poetry Review, another 50 or 150 equally deserving of mention have been left out. From John Ashbery to Eavan Boland, Hayden Carruth, Lucille Clifton, Robert Creeley, Carolyn Forché, Karen Fish, Tess Gallagher, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Donald Hall, Seamus Heaney, Edward Hirsch, Richard H ugo, Robinson Jeffers, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Charles Simic, W. D. Snodgrass, William Stafford, Maura Stanton, Susan Stewart, James Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Derek Walcott, Diane Wakoski, Rich ard Wilbur, John Yau....suffice it to say that with few exceptions, the authors whose correspondence, interviews, essays, and poetry are preserved in the American Poetry Review Records are writers who have made important contributions to literature in the late twentieth century. The new anthology titled The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review, edited by Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, and Arthur Vogelsang, with an introduction by Harold D. Bloom ( New York: W. W. Norton, 2000) is an attempt to make much of this legacy available in a single volume. Not included in the book are the significant number of translations from more than a dozen languages of the work of major poets from around the world. The archive of The American Poetry Review is and will remain an extraordinary resource for the study of twentieth-century literature and culture.