The Elegant Variation: SMALL PRESS WATCH

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April 13, 2004

SMALL PRESS WATCH - PRESSED WAFER

The Boston Phoenix focuses on Pressed Wafer, a five year old press that specializes in poetry books and chapbooks, and on why they keep up the struggle.

For the love of the art. This is the first answer and perhaps the best one, but does poetry need this sort of love? In the Nixon years, during the federal government’s Coordinating Council of Little Magazines, the answer was emphatically yes. Money poured . . . no, government money, be it federal or state, never pours into any of the arts, but it did drip into hundreds of little poetry magazines. Today, the National Endowment for the Arts, as chaired by poet Dana Gioia, believes that what poetry needs is productions of Shakespeare’s plays in American towns and cities. Oh, the largesse of the Bush government in an election year, even as editorials wail that strapped municipalities are struggling to keep their libraries open! The NEA’s attitude may be that no congressman will quarrel with the Bard, and anyway, love is being taken care of by Pressed Wafer and other private providers. But is it love to add more books to the glut that goes unread?

What does that say about the times that we find ourselves longing for Nixon?

SMALL PRESS ADDENDUM: Ron's latest five questions go to Jack Shoemaker, who is launching Shoemaker & Hoard.

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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