copyright (c) 1993 by Robert Kendall and Poets & Writers, Inc.
Theodore Weiss has likened literary magazine editors to "unlicensed pilots of a paper
boat . . . smuggling a cargo of precision glasses to a country peopled by a blind mob
rushing madly about." Yet for half a century now, he and his wife, Renée, have
persevered in keeping afloat their own paper boat, the Quarterly Review of Literature.
Considering the formidable hazards that drag most little-magazine editors under after a
few years, this must surely rate as one of the true publishing feats of our time.
Not only has the Weiss's tiny vessel been among the most durable vehicles for good
literature in the country, it has also been one of the most influential, despite--or
perhaps because of--a penchant for running against prevailing currents in publishing.
During the 1940s and '50s, QRL's cargo regularly included the work of such masters
as Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, as well as the early products of many
struggling young writers (John Gardner, for example) who went on to later eminence. The QRL
readership also became a sort of Ellis Island of literature, offering foreign writing in
translation a crucial point of entry into the rather insular literary tastes of postwar
America.
QRL was launched in 1943 by Warren Carrier, who a year later turned the magazine
over to his coeditor, the young poet and teacher Theodore Weiss. Soon afterward, Renée
joined him to assist with the editing and to take on the production chores. Her financial
acumen soon had the magazine paying for itself entirely from sales and subscriptions.
Though the magazine maintained loose affiliations with the universities where Theodore
Weiss taught--currently benefiting from free office space at Princeton--it has never
received university funding. "We started out fairly orthodoxly with poems, stories,
criticism, essays--the way most university magazines conduct themselves," recalls
Theodore Weiss. Soon, however, they began to feel that "too many people were devoting
too much of their time to criticism at the expense of writing itself." This led them
to turn the magazine over exclusively to creative work.
They filled the pages of early issues with work fresh from the pens of Wallace Stevens,
e.e. cummings, and Henry Miller, among others, and soon devoted entire issues to Marianne
Moore and Ezra Pound. William Carlos Williams found in QRL an especially hospitable
home for his poetry, including parts of "Paterson," at a time when it was still
undervalued.
Williams's correspondence with the editors expressed an increasingly apparent
gratitude, until he wrote in 1945, "Cheerio and let's see these next three issues of
your all important magazine. After that I'll practically be your slave, order what you
please and I'll bust a gut to satisfy you, just name the shot . . ." Theodore Weiss
still looks back with awe on this relationship with the Modernist master, which he
characterizes as a great tree leaning on a twig.
The roster of young, little-known writers the magazine presented in its early days now
often reads like a page from a Who's Who of Modern American Literature: John Ashbery,
Robert Coover, James Dickey, John Gardner, W.S. Merwin, Linda Pastan, and James Wright, to
name a few.
QRL's success in uncovering such a diverse range of significant new talent stems
partly from a well-developed editorial taste and partly from a conscious effort by the
editors to overcome the limits of their own taste. "You try to arrive at standards
that are resilient enough to accommodate all kinds of work," says Theodore Weiss.
"We have tried as hard as we could to throw the magazine open to work which is first
of all good in its own terms.
"We've tried to discover what those terms are. We've tried to discover whether
those terms are legitimately serious and worthwhile. And then we've tried to see how much
the writer manages to satisfy and fulfill those terms. If he or she does, then even though
it's not work I personally might want to make much of, we feel obliged to give it a house,
a home, and a voice."
Work from Louis Zukofsky and Karl Rakosi found its way into QRL despite Theodore
Weiss's avowed "taste for maximalism rather the fine minimalism" of these
authors. The editors were "not altogether taken with the theory behind the Black
Mountain group's writing," but they published large amounts of Denise Levertov and
Robert Duncan. On the other hand, the Weisses admit to some editorial gaffes: they
rejected the first stories of William Gass, urging him to send more work (he didn't), and
declined an excerpt from Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men because the
author refused (rightly, the editors now admit) to add a conclusive ending.
The editors have always felt a special commitment to foreign writing as part of a goal
to showcase work that "other people weren't paying sufficient attention to."
This spawned a number of special issues on writers from overseas. The first was devoted to
Kafka, whose stature had yet to be recognized in the United States. Another was the first
entire volume of Montale published in this country. Other special issues featured Valéry,
Leopardi, and Hölderlin, helping establish their American reputations.
Another unique focus was on longer works--novellas, plays, long poems--that other
magazines "wouldn't touch." To better accommodate these, the Weisses abandoned
the quarterly schedule in 1963 to put out two fat double issues each year.
This partiality isn't surprising, since Theodore Weiss's primary interest as a poet is
the long poem, and he has produced two book-length poems himself: Gunsight (New
York University Press, 1968) and Recoveries (Macmillan, 1982). "I like the
long encounter," he says, citing his fifty-year marriage as an example. "I like
burrowing into a poem and living with it--the longer the better, the richer, the more
exciting."
The editors don't dislike shorter poems, but preferred to publish groups of them rather
than isolated examples by individual authors. How else, they argue, can the reader become
acquainted with "the idiom, the attitudes, the material" of the poet?
This predilection for giving a poet a lot of space, combined with Theodore Weiss's
experiences as a poetry book editor for the Wesleyan University Press and Princeton
University Press, ultimately led to another change in course for QRL. Disturbed by
the number of good poetry collections that went begging due to the limited resources of
university and small presses, the editors started a unique venture in poetry publishing: QRL
became the QRL Poetry Series.
Explains Renée Weiss, "I felt that the way we could continue the magazine and yet
do books of poetry would be by combining them--putting them all under one cover and
continuing the subscription arrangement. So it turned out to be a remarkable advantage,
because it allows us to circulate books of poetry in a way that they have never been
circulated before."
Begun in 1978, the QRL Poetry Series has published four to six full-length books
of poetry in a single volume each year. These three-to-four-hundred-page offerings are
distributed as magazines, guaranteeing every author about two thousand sales through
subscriptions, and anywhere from several hundred to three thousand additional single-copy
sales--figures rarely achieved by small presses.
Combining several authors under one cover reduces production costs (allowing more books
to get into print) and increases the number of readers each poet will attract. Says
Theodore Weiss, "If a poet is new, young, or not very well known, having variety
there--other writers who might interest other readers--gives the poet a potential audience
which he or she will not have alone."
Looking back over Quarterly Review of Literature's long and unusual
history--which has left it now neither quarterly, nor a review, nor of literature in the
broadest sense--Theodore Weiss observes that the periodic twists and turns in the
magazine's course have probably kept it going. "To do the same thing for fifty years
gets a little tedious, not only for the editors but for the readers, too."
To celebrate the semicentennial milestone, the editors plan two special issues: an
anthology of recent work by QRL Poetry Series authors and an overview of the
magazine's entire span. This may seem like a modest effort compared to the four impressive
tomes that commemorated QRL's thirtieth anniversary--retrospective volumes devoted
to poetry, prose, criticism, and special issues. But the original plans for marking Year
30 called for only a single volume, so who knows where the current anniversary project
will ultimately lead?
Theodore Weiss admits to sometimes begrudging the time the magazine has taken away from
his own substantial career as a poet, which has borne twelve books and brought him
numerous awards. But he feels it all worthwhile because of the rewards that only editing
can bring.
"To receive poems from anybody--let alone Wallace Stevens or Williams--that are
first rate is very exciting. New planets come into your ken and you're the first person to
see it, the first person to acknowledge it, the first person to present it. Even as a poet
I've found that valuable."
Additionally, he observes, "The magazine was a way of establishing a community of
interest, and one of the great pleasures was the people you began to know, if only through
letters. You develop pen pals in and through their work, which meant that you got them at
their most serious and with what they cared about most."
He also feels strongly that poets should do what they can to foster the community of
poetry. The magazine is his way of "paying back for the privileges and
pleasures" of a life as a poet.
The literary world can consider itself paid back in full.
Vist the Quaterly Review of
Literature Web site for ordering information.
