Rob Casper presents "jubilat" (and Matthew Zapruder)

I am delighted to blog on poems and poetry for the Best American Poetry, and honored to follow in the footsteps of editors who have made this blog so lively. So, for the next three months of Sundays I'll send along poems from the pages of my literary magazine, jubilat.

A little bit about the magazine: I started it with other MFA students at the University of Massachusetts almost ten years ago. I remember booze-fueled nights on Michael Teig's back porch, arguing with Michael and Christian Hawkey about poems in the rangiest, most engaging way I'd experienced. jubilat began in that sprit, and with the great influence of a seminar we three took with professor Dara Wier called "Form and Theory in Contemporary Poetry" -- a seminar that used as its central text, without explanation, The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Through that class we realized the importance of reading poems within a larger context -- a context attuned to poetry's unorthodox connections to the world. We decided jubilat would present contemporary American poetry, but to place it alongside a varied selection of translations, reprints, found pieces, lyric prose, art, and interviews with poets and other artists. Instead of sectioning all of this off, we wanted to mix it together, the way the mind mixes the last poem it just encountered with all matter of thoughts and observations firing at the same time.

To that end, the first issue of the magazine -- out in Spring 2000 -- began with a fragment of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson, along with notes that quote a wonderful Emily Dickinson letter. It also contained a sizable selection from "The Jubilate Agno," the epic poem by the 18th Century English poet Christopher Smart for which the magazine was named (and which was included in the same aforementioned seminar!), as well as photographs of the back of library cards by Erica Baum with lovely fragments of cross-referencing notes (like "Opossums / Persimmons"), a long interview with Michael Palmer that touched upon such topics as his work with dancer Margy Jenkins and the use of philosophical texts in his poems, and "The Lost Epic of Arthur Davidson Ficke," a list of annotations, commentary, and notes of reference for an epic "rescued" by James Tate and Dara Wier.

And of course, we included poems by our favorite contemporaries -- among them Jorie Graham, Heather McHugh (who also gave us great translations of Paul Celan), Claudia Rankine, and Dean Young -- as well as a few of our peers, including the last poem of the issue, by a fellow UMass graduate student named Matthew Zapruder:

MIND THE GAP

A little portrait of me lies in the flowerbed
making allusions, watching her comb her hair.
She sings into the shattered mirror:
"But you will last as long as the rose,
as long as the glass, glass tulips . . ."
A can opener smiles on the night table.

I remember she loved and feared the dark.
Whenever the horses broke loose and threatened the begonias
her heart trembled under my hand like a bat.
We'd huddle all night in bed, counting.
The horses filled us with the ineffable grandeur
of their silent pounding, or something like that.
Mostly I liked not knowing what to expect.

The sun looms angrily, high above, stranded.
She walks, or rather meanders, towards my portrait, chanting
|"Phillip, your green thumbs, the envy of All Wales."
Each wisp of her hair grows larger, they wave and shine
like snakes you can see through. How strange. She
bends over me, blocking the sun.

This romantic, playful, intimate, and deftly unsettling lyric (how strange indeed, to be a portrait in a flowerbed observing one's beloved!) seemed the perfect place to end our beginning -- and we were happy to announce that our magazine was ready to not know what to expect. Much has changed since then -- like Matthew, Christian and Michael went on to write award-winning collections of poem -- but as Publisher I continue to try and find ways for the magazine to showcase the beauty and strangeness of the ordinary, and how experiments with language and image speak in a compelling way about who we are.

-- Rob Casper