Back to Life

Second Run, an online magazine out of Ames, Iowa, just published its first issue last week, and it’s a peculiar thing. This Second Run does not want the newest, freshest work to show off; it wants old work, poems that have appeared in journals that have either gone out of print, been buried in the back of some grad student’s closet, or have never had any kind of online presence. It wants a kind of zombie poetry.

The submission statement reads, in part:
“Problem: You publish in, even build a relationship with, a good journal. Eventually the journal succumbs to the odds and goes under, and libraries start dumping back issues. The paper is recycled. Your work is not . . .
“Solution: Second Run. We’re here to keep your work alive. Send us your poems, plays, essays and short stories, and if we agree that they’re worth saving, we’ll save them. Your best work will live on in the company of some of today’s best writers.”
So here in the first issue we have, among other delights, a Patricia Smith poem that first appeared in the Paris Review, a Ted Kooser poem that first appeared in the Great River Review, and five sonnets from Ada Limón which first appeared in MiPoesias.

It calls to mind the revivification work Duration Press has done by putting their old chapbooks online in pdf form—making work by Pierre Joris, Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Eleni Sikelianos and others available to anyone with a screen or a printer (when it was otherwise only available to denizens of Troubadour Books)—as well as the great stuff at Ubu editions, edited by Danny Snelson, Brian Kim Stefans and Kenneth Goldsmith. There you can find out-of-print work by Mairéad Byrn, Juliana Spahr, Hannah Weiner, and Ron Silliman, among quite a few others.
There’s some debate about whether or not keeping out-of-print work in pdf circulation keeps publishers from re-printing the stuff in perfect-bound form, but I’ll take Robert Fitterman’s “This Window Makes Me Feel” perfect bound or pdf, thank you. How many of the rest of you are likely to read second runs or pdf’s in lieu of the fetishized object?