Founded in 1980, the internationally acclaimed literary magazine Poetry East celebrated National Poetry Month with two milestones—its 40th anniversary and its 100th issue. In the notoriously fleeting world of poetry publications, where life-expectancy is typically less than 10 years, the journal’s record of sustained excellence is remarkable. More impressive still, Poetry East has been edited from the start by the noted poet Richard Jones, an English professor at DePaul University, where the magazine is based. Jones says, “Just as the sun rises in the east and brings new hope, so too is poetry necessary each day for its promise of redemption and possibility.”

Jones is a poet with upwards of a dozen poetry collections, including Paris, Avalon, and Stranger on Earth. For some thirty-four years he has taught poetry and literature at DePaul University, where he has mentored the student literary journal, curated the Writers Series, and worked with graduate and undergraduate students on Poetry East.

Poetry East has devoted itself to creating anthologies meant to stand the test to time: volumes devoted to painting, politics, art, photography, aesthetics, surrealism, and topics as varied as “Wonder,” “Seasons,” and “Love.” Most recently the journal expressed its international approach to poetry in a series devoted to the great cities of the world— London, Paris, Kyoto, Barcelona, Dublin, and of course, Chicago.

To mark the current 40-year milestone, Jones selected 100 poems from Poetry East’s first 100 issues for a stunning special anniversary edition of Poetry East (East of Eden Press) that includes the work of such literary giants as Charles Bukowski, Billy Collins, Connie Wanek, Czeslaw Milosz, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. The final poem of the issue is by Jones himself, a sonnet in which he writes that he has been guided by “no manifesto, no radical plan” during his four decades of publishing the journal. Instead he is simply driven by “the work of poetry: beauty, mercy, and peace.”

Mark Arendt discussed poetry and poets with Richard Jones for The National Book Review.

Q: Poetry East seems to be a unique literary journal in one very important respect: it is highly successful without having an editorial board and masthead of publishers. Rather, the journal has had a singular vision. Please explain how this transpired.

A: I’m not happy unless I’m creating something, and Poetry East keeps me busy and active. And though I admire the various arts where collaboration is essential—film, ballet, opera, theater—for me artistic creation is a solitary act. When I started out there was a journal called Kayak edited by the poet George Hitchcock. His said the journal was a "small watertight vessel operated by a single oarsman." He did everything by hand—selected the poems, created illustrations, printed the journal in his home on an old offset printer.

I wanted to emulate that, and for Poetry East to have the same wonderfully personal and almost eccentric, idiosyncratic energy that Kayak had with each issue. Hitchcock edited Kayak from 1964 to 1984 and it is one of the foundational journals in American literature. He published the early work of Charles Simic, W.S.Merwin, and James Tate, and a host of writers who have come to define the American canon.

Q: What was the journal’s seminal moment, its origin story? How does a young poet start a journal? How would you describe the vibe of those times?

A: I was sitting under a palm on the sunny beach in Santa Monica—I lived in Los Angeles in the late seventies typing classified ads for the L.A.Times—and realized I wanted to start a journal because I was feeling estranged and lonely, lonely for poetry, which I couldn’t find, or didn’t know how to find.

That day under the palm wasn’t exactly like the Beatles revelation of the man on the flaming pie, but I do remember the moment clearly. The only problem was I had no idea how to proceed or what to do or—most essentially—how to make a book.

A couple of years later I found myself in New York working in publishing. I was the lowest editor in the office, the production editor, but it was the perfect position for me. That’s where I learned how to make books. In Los Angeles I was lost and unhappy. But in New York in 1980, I found a vital poetry scene and a great music scene and art galleries and bookstores and, best of all, I found soul mates and fellow travelers.

Q: You started the journal during those “ancient times,” before computers, cell phones, email, and all the new printing technologies.

A: Yes! Proofreaders read actual galleys—long scrolls of text—and corrections were made at light tables in the art department. One had to depend on the U.S.Mail—stamps and envelopes! One typed on a manual typewriter. Or wrote in longhand.

Back then I also learned about making books by hand on letterpress machines. It seems anachronistic, but I think all those old-school methods taught me to go slow and be patient. The mindfulness lessons from those years still inform my work today, which is now done primarily on the computer. That’s where my young, super-skilled co-workers—graduate students and interns at DePaul—become so integral to the process.

The computer can be an amazing tool for creativity and design and invention, and I credit my young collaborators of the last two decades with helping make the journal so beautiful in its recent incarnations. I’m glad to have lived through this amazing era of technological innovations.

Q: In The Bliss of Reading: 40 Years of Poetry East one may discern an international sensibility. Through 100 issues the journal has promoted and often introduced poets from around the world to U.S. audiences. Miklos Radnoti and Yannis Ritsos, Nazim Hikmet and Czeslaw Milosz, to mention a few that reappear in the anthology.

Was this early international presence in Poetry East, and your own interest in translation, a concerted effort to address aesthetic features lacking in this country’s literary landscape at the time? Was it promoting an aesthetic neglected by the journals and publishing houses when you began Poetry East?

A: When I was first starting out as a poet, writers in translation were enormously important to me. They seemed able—in the most natural way—to hold together the private and the public, the domestic and the political, the mundane and the sacred. I loved the balance of the personal and the political, the call for social action and the honest prayer of spiritual longing. The poets you’ve named seemed important and necessary. And the older poetry never seemed anachronistic or unconnected. Their art didn’t have the broad divisions or narrow specializations that I often found in American poetry, and I felt that the international poets were able to speak to the broad range of human experience and emotion.

The problem was and is that work in translation can be hard to find, so a great deal of credit goes to the translators. I remember the immediate debt I felt to Kenneth Rexroth when reading his classic Chinese and Japanese poets, especially the women poets, the courtesans and the priestesses.

I remember reading and sensing those voices whispering to me intimately from across the centuries from far-removed places, still timely, relevant, and fully alive. It was a moment when I thought not just about translation, but about poetry itself: this art is a miracle—the ability to speak across time and culture and history, to speak about the eternal present and make the moment truly come alive.

Q: Milosz asserts in Incantation, “Philo-Sophia is beautiful and very young, /as poetry is, allied with her in the service of Good.” Do you view this line (among many through the years) as instance of a Poetry East Ars poetica? In what ways is “poetry in the service of the Good?”

A: Well poets like Yehuda Amichai or Neruda certainly seem to be in the service of the good. And the same can be said of the Polish poets, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski. As a young poet, Rilke and Hikmet were my touchstones in terms of being in the “service of the Good”—Rilke for his passion to the craft and to mystery, Hikmet for his passion for freedom and human rights.

Ultimately these writers brought me back to English poetry, and then finally to the Americans, Whitman and Dickinson, Eliot and Frost. William Carlos Williams—whose poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” is in the service of the good—expresses it differently.

Poetry is the news that stays news. What is weak or corrupt will fade and turn to dust. What is Good lasts and is always at the service of readers, of humanity.

Q: Is there a definitive Poetry East aesthetic? If there is, it certainly isn’t formalist, though the journal does publish metrical verse. It isn’t narrative, though the journal does publish poems that privilege story. And though lyrical free verse represents the greater part of poems that appear, the presence of the aforementioned examples, and the constant variety revealed in issue after issue, bespeaks to some overarching aesthetic principle beyond form, something that is predicated upon what a poem is saying, both to the mind and the heart. Is this accurate to say?

A: I try to be open to everything, to all sorts of poems, and I like poetry that is also open—that takes the reader seriously as an ally and comrade, a friend and confidant. I need to feel the voice of the poet speaking to me, reasoning with me sometimes, cajoling me, playing with me, confessing to me. I’m less interested in writerly poems that simply desire my admiration.

So you’re right: it has to do with the mind and the heart. I need to be engaged fully. Many today balk at the word “soul,” but I need to feel that deep soul connection to the word. There is a certain inwardness I seek that is the opposite of solipsism or narcissism. A poem needn’t be grand or overtly ambitious to connect with a reader.

A poem can be simple. It can simply be another person pointing out to me how important, how necessary a red wheelbarrow is. I like a poem that takes that particular kind of risk, the poem that invites the reader to really depend on it for some indispensable truth. “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow….” The Romantic poets said they wanted the entire world in a grain of sand. I’m cut from the same cloth.

Q: One does not peruse the many volumes of Poetry East without noting the number of first-time poets published along with major voices. Is this, too, deliberate?

A: I think that poets who might not have found a home elsewhere saw in the journal the kind of work we are describing and recognized kindred spirits. Many first-time writers saw in the journal a place where they wanted to showcase their work. And I was delighted to read these new voices, who were not necessarily young, just unpublished.

It was a privilege over the decades to give writers their start, or at least a helping hand, but it was also a natural part of the creative enterprise. It makes a statement, does it not, to juxtapose a new voice next to a Nobel Prize winner? My point was and is that we are all working toward the same goal, all working in the service of the good.

Q: You have authored upward of a dozen poetry books. Are the realms of an editor and poet circumscribed? Not in terms of the actual workload, but in terms of aesthetics. In other words, is there a synergy achieved in both writing and editing poetry for 40 years; and if so, can you discuss how it is revealed in the tasks?

A. I confess the relationship, the synergy, has always been a bit of a mystery to me, though it is real. I tend always to either be writing my own poems or editing the journal—or both simultaneously!—so obviously there is overlap. I think the editing—one particular reader selecting one poem out of hundreds for publication—inevitably influences the writing. So many considerations: how does the poem work aesthetically, formally, morally, politically, spiritually. Reading so many poems over the years I’ve come to know not only what I like in a poem, but what I don’t. This is very helpful in writing my own poems. I think both Poetry East and my own books have evolved quite naturally together over the years. I think the blessing was to somehow know early on how I felt about poetry and what I wanted to do. There is so much luck and grace involved, and that gift was there from the start. The trick, then, is in simply staying true to the vision and doing the work, day in and day out.

Q: Poetry East has had many dedicated issues. You’ve featured poets like Tom McGrath and Gerald Stern. You’ve made anthologies devoted to photography and the visual arts, even a volume of master works called “Great Poems.” What were the factors behind some of these, and are any particularly dear to you? For what reasons?

A: I must say that I’ve enjoyed the four-volume series of anthologies devoted to “Origins,” which explores the composition process. The Origins series is marvelous because it is full of marvelous poems by poets like Hayden Carruth and Adrienne Rich and Connie Wanek and Robert Bly. I simply selected great contemporary poems and asked the poets to speak about their craft, their sense of writing poetry. The individual poem and accompanying essay bring poetry alive in an intimate and unpretentious and accessible way. These are inspiring volumes, perhaps most especially for new poets and new readers.

More recently, I’ve loved Poetry East’s anthologies dedicated to the world’s great cities: London, Paris, Kyoto, and Barcelona. It’s a great way to explore the world canon. The special issue on Chicago featured the great public sculpture one finds in the city—Picasso, Miro, Dubuffet, Claes Oldenburg, Magdelena Abakanowisc, Alexander Calder. I wanted to suggest that poetry could be much the same—incorporated everywhere in the city on any given day, on any street you happen to find yourself walking. Poetry, like those public sculptures, is, to my mind, ever present. Poetry East, ideally, should be as natural as rain and as welcome as sunlight. And as surprising as turning a street corner to find a sculpture by Marc Chagall or Henry Moore.

Q: The visual arts have, from the onset, been integral to the journal’s artistic vision. What are the criteria for those splendid Poetry East covers, or 40 years of memorable art portfolios? What are the plain economics involved in such dedication to the presentation of painters and photographers?

A. Painting has always been an inspiration to me, and the journal has featured some remarkable artists over the years. In the beginning in New York, I was able to visit galleries and see the new painters, so Poetry East was among the first to feature cutting-edge artists like Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, Francesco Clemente, Sandy Skoglund, and countless others. And our covers have featured both famous artists like Salvador Dali and Matisse and Kandinsky, as well as continuing to feature contemporary painters from around the world, like Makoto Fujimura, Gloria Munoz, Kahn & Selesnick, Brian Detmer, and Patricia Canelake.

Forty years ago, it was prohibitively expensive to publish color art, so I had to be frugal like a fox to indulge my passion for paintings. But now it’s possible financially and technologically, to feature art in every issue, so I do!

Q: You spoke of nurturing careers. What are some features of the relationship between poet and publisher? You are known to actively edit, if necessary. Good editors are often part of the creative process (think Pound and Eliot, of course, but the examples are numerous.) You have spoken of revision as “regarding vision…” Can you elaborate?

A: The editor, too, is an artist, the one who “brings the poetry to light.” Poems are hard to write, hard to make, and when I see a manuscript that is almost there and I know I can help bring the poem over the finish line, I’m happy to be of service. Poets are grateful when they find an active editor. I know in my own poems what most interests me are those poems in which the heart of the matter is almost out of reach. Poetry so often exceeds our grasp. But showing an almost-there poem to a sensitive and willing reader who can help you “regarding vision”—as I’ve shown you, my friend, poems-in-progress over the years and you’ve generously offered insight—is just enormously helpful. A poet needs to see the poem clearly in all its richness and possibility. An editor actively serves this process of seeing. I don’t believe poems need be abandoned, but with work they obtain their necessary shape. The process can be arduous, but the result—the poem—should seem as natural as a leaves on a tree.

Q: What of bruised egos? Do writers respond well to your methods? What of the memorable encounters, good and bad, 40 years of publishing have engendered?

A: I’ve published such a range of poets, from Denise Levertov to Mary Oliver to Adrienne Rich to Charles Bukowski, from young, debut poets to Nobel Prize winners, that what astonishes me is the sense of comraderie and fellowship I’ve found among poets over the generations.

The old pros don’t always need my help, but I’m happy to edit, and I do, and in my experience, poets seem almost by nature to be filled with gratitude, maybe even joy to have their work taken as serious and devoted to the craft. Bruised egos are found, perhaps not unsurprisingly, among those who have not completely given themselves to the art.

Anyone who has committed fully to poetry begins with the understanding that the craft is humbling and that the last thing a true poem can sustain is a poet’s ego. Now outside of the pages of a book there’s the poet’s life, and sometimes life can be complicated. And bruising. But that’s a different story.  

Q: One reviewer said the journal is “a page turner;” each poem is so rich and astonishing, that one can’t wait to turn the page and get to the next poem. Another reviewer called the journal “magical.” The journal has long been noted for its excellence; but Poetry East is also accessible and entertaining. Is this quality, too, part of what could be called its “mission statement?”

A: I hope that’s so. My credo is to publish poems that are immediate, accessible, universal, and timeless. Great poems are astonishing on both the first read as well as on the thousandth read. You can’t say that about many things, but it’s a good definition of a masterpiece. A masterpiece is that special work of art you can return to again and again for sustenance.

When putting together “The Bliss of Reading,” I was delighted to see how the poems stood the test of time. Like the poet Arne Ruste says in his poem “The Last Believer in Words, “I believe in things that take a long time to make, like trees and books.”

I couldn’t agree more, and I want them to last forever.

Mark Francis Arendt currently teaches literature and creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. A poet, and longtime associate of Poetry East, and he recently served as guest editor for Poetry East’s Spring 2019 Ireland issue.