The Sumac Reader - Softcover

Harrison, Jim; Gerber, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870134620 ISBN 13: 9780870134623

Publisher: Michigan State University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Sumac was a Michigan-based literary journal founded in 1968 by poets Dan Gerber and Jim Harrison; novelist Thomas McGuane joined the editorial staff in 1969 as the fiction editor. When the inaugural issue appeared, more than 250 American literary magazines were listed in The Directory of Magazines and Small Presses; within three years, Sumac rose to the first tier of these publications and was nationally recognized for its eclecticism and editorial quality. The Library Journal called it "one of the best little magazines now being published."  
      Remaining true to Sumac's energetic catholicity, The Sumac Reader is an anthology that contains poetry, experimental fiction, and works in translation that originally appeared in the magazine. Contributors include four Pulitzer Prize-winning poets―Galway Kinnell, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, and Gary Snyder―along with Paul Blackburn, Hayden Carruth, Richard Hugo, Denise Levertov, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, and Diane Wakoski. There are early poems by Charles Simic, James Tate, and Michael Waters, as well as a complete section from Galaway Kinnell's classic, The Book of Nightmares. Fiction is represented in Sumac by a first-published Jim Heynen story "Coyote" and early prose by William Kittredge. Translations from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Russian bring to American readers the work of masters such as Tu Fu, Lorca, and Li Po. A variety of poetic forms are represented, including ghazals, narratives, suites, found poems, and the freest of free verse.

About this title

About the Author:

Joseph Bednarik is an editor with Story Line Press in Eugene, Oregon.

Review:

This wonderful collection captures the eclectic sweep and attuned editorship behind Sumac, the Michigan-based little magazine that in its run of 9 remarkable issues from 1968 to 1971 published definitive and enduring poems from those culturally complicated, critical years. Edited with incipient energy and uncoded intuition by Dan Gerber, Jim Harrison and Tom McGuane, all of whom matured into first-rank writers, The Sumac Reader serves as a time capsule for a moment in contemporary American letters when certain of the country's finest mid-and-late-Twentieth Century poets were completing and publishing liberating and visionary work. For readers unfamiliar with Diane Wakoski's archetypal, mustached and motorcycled betrayer, he's here, resplendent as a fount for the poet's sexual psyche and rage and as testimony to eroticism's complexities. Here too are key poems from Galway Kinnell's classic Book of Nightmares, with its assignation of the body parts of Christian man to tormentors and tormented ("To the last man surviving on earth/I give my eyelids worn out by fear, to wear/in his long nights of radiation and silence....") and here one rediscovers in a thrilling pair of poems Adrienne Rich's enigmatic "Blue Ghazals." Sumac first published "Smokey the Bear Sutra," Gary Snyder's incantatory charm for eco-wisdom and harmony, and J.D. Reed's classic sixties poem "The Chuck Berry Triptych," with both works reprinted in the Reader. Though the Reader's emphasis is on Sumac's collectivity of marvelous and durable poems, there's memorable prose as well. Jerry Bumpus, a man who has never received the broader measure of recognition worthy of his storytelling talents, is represented by "A War Story," a narrative of refined craft and empathetic attentiveness that tells of Rhonda and her husband Lance Corporal Rory Roberts, of the numbing residue of stepping on a claymore landmine and of the sensual materiality of Silva Thins cigarettes. William Kittredge's vivid prose quartet, "Images of Spiritual Parenthood," is republished here, as are translations by Morgan Gibson, Basil Bunting and others. Independent and little literary periodicals infrequently have long lives. Their pages herald the work of those immediate years covered by their particular duration. Sumac was one of the best and a quarter-century after the fact of its final issue The Sumac Reader provides proof of its startling excellence. -- From Independent Publisher

About this edition

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0870134620
• ISBN 13: 9780870134623
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 236
• Editor: Bednarik Joseph