When
we parted ways at the end of our previous installment of the AWP saga, dear
reader, we were, as you may recall, about to blog about the AWP book and
journal exhibits.
No
room at the Chicago Hilton was big enough for the several solar systems of
exhibits, so you had to move from giant room to giant room through a warren of
stairways and halls that kept me wondering whether I’d really found all the
rooms. One enormous room of exhibits looks pretty much like another enormous
room of exhibits, and one row of exhibits looks pretty much like another row
(until you look at the individual tables, of course), so you find yourself
accidentally circling back to places you’ve already circled through. But I just
flew with the flow, going up and down every row and letting myself wander this
way and that way until I felt pretty certain I had joined the crazy few who
actually saw the whole thing.
I
loved the exhibits. I focused on looking at journals. Usually, I passed quietly
by journals I already know well, even when I subscribe to them. I was looking
for journals I didn’t know at all or didn’t know well. It amazes me that people
still keep inventing new paper journals. When editors asked “How you doing?”
and I said I was having a great time, some of them expressed surprise. I guess some
people felt overwhelmed and answered the question with moaning and whining. Maybe
the moaners worry about what they see as competition from such a horde of other
writers, or maybe they can’t handle crowds, writers or not, but I found the
crowds exhilarating. All those people who love reading and writing—how can you
beat that? I truly did have a great time, even though, as the journal editors
chatted, now and then I had to force myself not to say what I really thought.
So
here’s what I didn’t say. Some of those journals—they’re ugly.
Some
people must think it doesn’t matter what a journal of words looks like, but I
love looking at journals as well as reading them. I didn’t see other people
(though there must have been some) standing at the booths and actually reading
the journals, but that didn’t stop me, and sometimes it was fun to chat with
editors about the poems they had published. They work so hard on their
magazines that sometimes they seemed to get a kick out of seeing a live reader
reading and then hearing what that reader thinks. And it’s just as interesting
for me to hear how the editors think.
Anyway,
I’m not alone in thinking that it matters what a journal looks like. Some of
them are ugly, but lots of them look great, in all sorts of ways. Since I
didn’t see anyone else standing at the booths and reading, that indicates all
the more how much difference the look makes, because the look is all you get if
you don’t read and until you do read. The reputation of a journal, and even its
self-definition, often depend on its visual design more than on the words on
the page or screen. Some of the supposedly edgiest journals, both in their
self-proclamations and in what others say about them, turn out to read like
fairly ordinary or traditional stuff, but they look snarly or cool, artsy or au
courant, and that makes their buzz.
Next
installment: how some journals muff their design.
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