Title: Phoebe

 

 

Format: bi-annual print and online

 

Publishes: prose & poetry

 

 

Press: Ghost Peach Press (Bird Coat Quarterly)

 

 

This week Sapling talks with

Meredith Sue Willis & Kevin Stein @ Hamilton Stone Review.

 
Sapling: MSW What should people know who may not be familiar with Hamilton Stone Review?
 
HSR: The Hamilton Stone Review has been around for nearly twenty years, flying below the radar for a long time as we figured out what we wanted to do and how to do it. We are part of a cooperative publishing venture, Hamilton Stone Editions, which began by reprinting members’ out-of-print literary fiction. Later we added previously unpublished books—and HSR. The journal has had only three poetry editors (Halvard Johnson, Roger Mitchell, and now Kevin Stein) who always opened the poetry side to all the poets.  Our fiction and nonfiction prose, on the other hand, have often been by invitation only. Once I did an all-West Virginia issue; several times we’ve highlighted new books from Hamilton Stone. Once an editor featured a highly accomplished writers’ group.
 
Sapling: How did the name for Hamilton Stone Review come about?
 
MSW: The review was named for the publishing house, so the obvious next question is, where did that name come from? Some years back I was in a writers’ group with a woman who was a copywriter for Bonwit Teller’s print advertising department. She was very elegant and sophisticated at selling. She said above all don’t be too clever in naming a publishing venture. A publishing house, she said, should sound solid and tweedy, and, if possible, Episcopalian. Think Charles Scribner’s Sons. Out of thin air she plucked Hamilton Stone as sounding just right. We discussed it at a meeting of the members (she wasn’t one of them) and since we couldn’t agree on a name, we gave up and used her suggestion. I’ve always wondered what would have happened to us if we’d named ourselves, say, Willis and Stein, or Circe’s Spawn, or Arctic Alligator?  
 
Sapling: What do you pay close attention to when reading submissions for Hamilton Stone Review? Any deal-breakers?
 
KS: The aesthetic statement that accompanies our call for submissions fairly represents what we’re after when it comes to poetry. HSR welcomes an array of aesthetic approaches to the making of poems. HSR looks for poems that both sing and mean – however broadly the latter may be regarded – and poems that show appreciation for both private and public history as well as the interplay between the two realms. What am I looking for when I open submissions? In short, as a reader I like to be surprised. And I favor poems enacting this surprise within me and also reflecting that surprise has arisen within the poet, too. The most satisfying poems involve an act of epiphany – small or large – that subtly alters how we see the world and ourselves. Along those lines, it’s helpful to recall Frost’s apt remark: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” 
 
I am drawn to work showing keen attention to sound. A poem is a kind of tune, of course, that carries its own rhythms and pauses, its own swellings and diminishings, its silences as poignant as its flourishes. I relish this musicality of language performed by the poet’s peculiar voice, a tone that may well be playful and serious at turns. As a reader, I am partial to poems in which the speaker strikes me as a real person – with all the warts and blessings therefrom – instead of a mere cardboard character lacking depth.
 
One final quality I like to encounter is a sense of risk. In fact, a notion of risk can be said to underlay all the factors noted above. It inheres in the poet’s choice of subject matter, form, voice, language – all the places where the poet consciously or unconsciously makes the choices that make a poem a made thing. In sum, a safe poem is a boring poem. 
 
Deal-breakers? Let’s say sloppy attention to the above qualities. Being bubble-letter cutesy or proudly wearing the moth-eaten tweed of profundity. Lazy use of rhyme. Hyper-sentimentality. J.D. Salinger calls sentimentality “loving something more than God does.” Ouch, but he’s spot on.
 
Sapling: Where do you imagine Hamilton Stone Review to be headed over the next few years? What’s on the horizon?
 
MSW: We just expanded the co-op’s board, so we’re about to be thinking about the future of the whole enterprise. As long as we have excellent editors willing to take on choosing pieces, we’ll certainly continue Hamilton Stone Review. One of the things I have liked about HSR has been its dependability. Thanks to our editors, we have been able to offer a stable outlet for people’s work. I like us to continue doing that. 
 
Sapling:  As an editor, what is the hardest part of your job? The best part?
 
KS: Undoubtedly, the best part is saying yes to a poem because it has won me over wholly. It’s akin to meeting someone new and swooning a bit under their sway, feeling lucky for having them enter and charge one’s own realm. Saying yes to a poem also means saying yes to a person, too, the poet who fretted over those lines and fervently wished to make the words just right for the reader’s ears. As a poet, I know well the feeling of affirmation that arrives when a poem is accepted. Sure, a vote of confidence in me the writer, but also a surge of belief in that poem as poem, the made thing.
 
This reality has its requisite flip side: The worst part of editing is saying no. And the more one has to say no as the poems wing in over the electronic transom, the more the naysaying wears on one. Over time, one may develop a callous as one would on ungloved hands at work. If it also feeds a callousness of spirit, then one ought to find another job.
 
Sapling: If you were stranded on a desert island for a week with only three books, which books would you want to have with you?
 
KS: Aha, one’s literary Trinity! This is a great question. It’s not being evasive but celebratory to say one’s list changes as oneself changes over the years. What I’d have taken with me at age 21 differs markedly from what I’d have taken at 40 or now in my 60s. For that desert island I’d want something that challenges and yet rewards me all at once. So, I’ll start with William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience not only for how it would cause me to think hard but also for how it would hint of the availability of the spiritual, the latter something I’d surely need if alone and deserted. Next would be James Wright’s powerful, groundbreaking, and gorgeously written The Branch Will Not Break. Last would be Lisel Mueller’s Alive Together, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for the collection’s cleanliness of lines and human warmth. 
 
Sapling: Just for fun (because we like fun and the number three) if Hamilton Stone Review was a person what three things would it be thinking about obsessively?

MSW: Old Ham the Journal would be thinking about the problem of how to get shaped poetry onto the digital page. And how do you keep a magazine going when no money ever comes in? And will there will ever be more readers than writers?