jubilalia: An Orbital Small Press Convo with CARYL PAGEL
on community, gatemaking, astrotransit, and the ends and beginnings of all that is troubling
Caryl Pagel is the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. She is also a co-founder of Rescue Press and an editor at jubilat since 2011. Following the announcement that jubilat was calling it quits after twenty years, Zach asked questions and Caryl obliged with answers.
This conversation was conducted over Zoom on January 21, 2020. The sun came out in Cleveland. Caryl wore a hat in Florida.
Zach Peckham: You’ve been involved with a handful (or two) of small press projects for a while now, but how did you actually end up working on jubilat?
Caryl Pagel: I’ve been there as an editor for about a decade. The journal was started by Rob Casper and a handful of other poets at the UMass MFA in 2000—just the way people start things, they were excited about poetry and they wanted to start a journal—and there were a variety of different editors while Rob was publisher, many with ties to the UMass community, and then sometime around 2011 Rob decided to pass it on to Emily Pettit. She had already been involved as a reader and in different editorial capacities, and when she became publisher she asked Kevin González and I to join in the editorial work (the three of us had gone to grad school together). A few years ago Kevin left to focus on writing and Emily passed the publishing responsibilities on to Dara Wier, at which point the three of us became the editors.
ZP: I feel like that’s a pretty common kind of story for a lot of journals and small presses. It’s a social thing, hence the passing on. Like, no one applied for a job or anything, and yet it’s become this kind of de facto part of the institutional or professionalized literary infrastructure.
CP: For sure. I feel like I’m finally getting old enough to have witnessed different generations and periods of time in small press editing and publishing and how different resources and operational structures and editorial priorities have guided various publications. Around the time that Emily took over jubilat, which was around when Rescue started too, there were a ton of new journals and presses popping up all over the place, many at UMass, and that was a very ordinary thing to do after an MFA. You would just make something like a reading series or a space or a journal. That was something I had been paying attention to, admiring, leading up to my post-MFA years. But it’s been interesting to watch, to your point—and this is a point I like to make in my teaching as well as my work—that a lot of small press culture really just is that people started a thing one day. Friends wanted to play a game, or people wanted to share each other’s work, or they wanted to build things as a way of learning what they didn’t already know about writing or art. And one of the interesting things, which is what we’re talking about now, is that these projects naturally don’t all stick around because they are often so conditional and transient, but the ones that do start to feel institutional.
ZP: Even though they’re not.
CP: Right. They’re just scrappy for the longest amount of time.
ZP: Which seems kind of fucked up right? In a way it seems like a punishment. Like, the promise should be that if one just sticks around (and this is the false promise of all unpaid labor I guess) then eventually one will get paid. But it’s not that input-output system. So like not only is it not going to materialize into a career or something sustainable in most cases, it’s eventually also going to make you “the man” by virtue of having existed long enough.
CP: Totally. It’s like punk kids selling out, but never getting the paycheck. Haha.
ZP: Ha. Yeah or like the aging punk who’s still playing the basement shows and hanging out with the twenty year olds and everyone’s like “ew gross” when actually that person is the most punk. So it’s kinda like, what do we all want here?
CP: Right. But yeah, to your point, we didn’t interview for these jobs, and so much of small press editing takes place in a space that is less job and more service. The editors at jubilat gladly volunteered their time and UMass had a managing editor position for an MFA student and we also worked with student readers and contributing and past editors. jubilat has always been a community effort, and that community has grown and grown to where it’s much larger than it used to be, but that notion of community has been the real driving spirit. One of the pleasures of working in the small press world is that you are immediately part of a community, and I know that word is used all the time in a variety of meaningless ways, but it’s true. Part of the cool thing about jubilat is that though I had been reading the journal forever and I knew Emily, I didn’t go to UMass and those teachers weren’t my teachers, so I got to just learn a lot about their aesthetic from the outside in. I didn’t just think “what are my favorite poems” but had to consider “what are the poems that should go in jubilat” because I understood its specialness.
ZP: What do you think that specialness is?
CP: To me, jubilat has always prioritized poetry and art and ephemera that is interested in fun and humor, even when subject matter is serious, as well as chaos and coincidence. A certain relationship with the art world maybe. A lot of the poems that have been published there have been active in a way; energized, animated. There is a rambunctious energy, which comes from the work that’s included as well as the hodge-podge piling of it all. Found work, interviews, comics. There’s this sense that almost anything goes. There are a lot of really innovative and interesting experimental journals now, but when I first started reading jubilat it felt experimental in its openness. It didn’t feel academic.
ZP: I wonder about the extent to which that kind of quality—which is hard to articulate—is the result of some very specific internal and social dynamics, and particularly if on the inside a project is somehow community-minded, if that gets imprinted outwardly in some aesthetic way.
CP: I think it totally does. The small presses I’ve gotten to work with have been particularly friendly places that feel beholden to readers and authors and whatever wider community we’re part of. In many of those places we don’t have an “aesthetic agenda”, we don’t have a boss, and I think for that reason the joy and the love is allowed to come through a little more. I mean I hope so. I hope what you’re saying is true. I feel like it is for jubilat.
ZP: How do you feel like being part of that jubilat interior, if you can say from the inside, has influenced your own writing and reading? Whatever the linkage might be between aesthetic and taste.
CP: I don’t think I’ve ever worked with two more genuinely curious people than Dara and Emily. They both have such a great instinctive sense of where the mystery lies in things, and I think that curiosity as a driving force has taught me a lot about poetry. The role of the imagination has always been a priority for jubilat, which is something I thought I understood, but I really learned from the journal and the other editors and readers who’ve worked there about the imagination’s capacity to make new futures through poetry. Imagination as a poetics. Before that, or even still, I think my own tendency is to be in conversation with an idea or form from the past somehow, and maybe that’s more of a feeling than a practice, but I’ve always been interested in archives and documents and looking back. Even my first book and my first poems were looking at archival materials and were in conversation with Niedecker and Dickinson and old scientific journals, lots of dead people, and jubilat does some backward-looking too, but I think I learned a lot more about pushing open new spaces in front of the poem.
ZP: Yeah your books all have skulls on the covers and stuff.
CP: Right. I’m like a skull that got to go edit with some astronauts.
ZP: Haha. So looking ahead, to when you go on to become an intergalactic skull or whatever, what do you think the effect will have been of working with Rescue, the Poetry Center, and jubilat all together, on your own practice as a writer but also in terms of how you see yourself as an artist or a “literary citizen”?
CP: I like this question. Of course each of these places have their different lessons and it’s hard to articulate what the cumulative effect of it all is. But I think if you were to look at the whole catalog of Rescue Press, which I started with Danny Khalastchi in 2009, and now work on with him and Alyssa Perry and Sevy Perez and the Open Prose editors and occasional invaluable volunteers and interns, and where I’ve been heavily involved in every title, the totality of whatever that all is—some of which is highly experimental, some of which is deeply grounded in form, some of which is art-based, poetry, prose, hybrid work, etc.—if you could somehow add all that up, then maybe you could tell me what my aesthetic is. But I’ve definitely avoided, from a marketing perspective and otherwise, trying to put that into language because I don’t want to lead myself anywhere. I want to continue to be open to the work that I’m reading and to discovering new kinds of things, to change.
Rescue, jubilat, and the Poetry Center are all community efforts in different ways, which makes them similar in one sense but there’s also a lot of variability in what each of those communities look like and thus how each of them operate. I want to remain open to the possibilities of each, understanding that their particular ways of working are a function of the communities they comprise and are a part of.
ZP: I want to talk about this word community a little bit, because it keeps coming up.
CP: Ugh, I know! It’s the foundation of everything I believe in and I’m so sick of the word, because it’s such a sort of trendy way of talking about things. But it’s true!
ZP: Yeah, I mean, there’s a way that talking about “community” all the time can just be a really virtue-signally way of being an asshole, or getting away with being an asshole. Which is obviously not the way you’re using it.
CP: Yeah “obviously”... thanks.
ZP: I mean look at that hat! Haha. But seriously though, I’m interested in that too. In the ways that writing, which is supposedly this really solitary and internal process, is actually not that at all. We just aren’t better at making that distinction culturally or in marketing, however it is that we’ve built up our collective sense of what writing is. But it makes me think of how there are these inherently oppositional tendencies in “the writer”: to pull away from the world or invent another one or hide away to get a particular kind of work done on one hand, but then this counter-need to desperately be a part of the world on the other. But it’s like why write and go through that whole process, visualizing a potential reader all the while, if not to ultimately share with others in the real world that we’re in now? It’s like this pulling away to be closer. And in doing that I think one can end up in this kind of nothing-place. Wondering what am I doing, what is this really about, what is anything for. But here: my theory is that this is exactly why friendships are so important, and therefore communities by extension. Because at least in the current landscape where making a living doing this kind of stuff is so often out of the question, real community seems to be the only thing that gives this essentially social work form any actual meaning. Which is maybe why community feels like the only word that works, when in order to exist you need to be somehow solitary yet social, all-encompassing of the professional and non-professional, verbal and non-verbal ways in which all of this writing and publishing stuff takes place. But I don’t know if that’s anything.
CP: I feel like you’re describing many of the tensions and contradictions of my life. Maybe your life too. I don’t have great insight because it seems like this is precisely the struggle. Maybe it doesn’t feel that way to true extroverts, or to folks who have less difficulty transitioning from the “inside” to the “outside”. I struggle with that. Like you’re saying, so much of my work is deeply social, and that’s everything from going to readings and teaching to editing, which feels very social but is also intensely private and intimate. Sometimes I dream of a bizarre world where I could actually compartmentalize everything, and I could take all the parts of my job and my life that require deep focus and deep thought and aloneness and privacy, like editing and writing and thinking and trying to have a directional vision for these various projects, and then the other half of the year would be teaching and going to readings and talking and going to work. I mean, obviously that’s ridiculous, but I do really feel that tension throughout any given day. Like when I’m in some kind of creative zone and then I have to go talk to someone. And usually I’m incredibly lucky in that I almost always actually really want to go talk to whoever that person is, so I can’t even blame it on them. Haha. But it’s just like, I feel like I’m on the moon and then I’m on earth, I’m on the moon and then I’m on earth.
ZP: Haha! [a nod to all intergalactic skulls]
CP: And sometimes it’s exhausting, and that’s not a complaint, it’s just a desire to be a different person who can have less of a commute between those locations. But to your point about friendship, I agree about the importance, and I can talk about another specific friend who’s extremely involved in small press publishing adventures, and that’s Hilary Plum. I could talk about her brilliance forever, and that would be a whole separate interview, but we work together at Rescue, and at the PC, and we teach in the same place—our lives are very intertwined. That working relationship and that kind of intellectual intimacy is so crucial, because that kind of friend can actually reach you regardless of whether you’re on the moon or on earth. You can be in that weird creative between-space together and it works no matter where you’re at. You don’t have to put your face back on or whatever. That kind of collaborator can speedily translate and participate in and escalate and revise one’s perpetual excitements and inspirations, and vise versa.
Maybe one common thing with each of these different small press projects is that there’s a type of collaborative closeness that develops with the people you’re making things with, a kind of ongoing conversation that makes the outcome always somewhat unexpected and vibrant. And then all these projects together, I don’t know if they’ve made me a better writer—I’m not sure if you can say that about yourself—but they’ve definitely taught me so, so much. And it’s the best kind of learning where you can’t even tell it’s happening, and I think that comes from getting to read all of this work in these three places over the last ten years. I just feel like a better editor in all of these roles because of the amount of reading it requires and the number of conversations about the reading that happen. And also from jumping between them, navigating the changes in input and perspective and desire that result from participating in this literature-making with different people in different ways, over time.
ZP: Maybe this is an argument for having multiple projects going at once?
CP: Definitely. Regardless of how overwhelmed I might feel in a given moment, all of those projects have made each one better. I 100% believe that. And I was thinking I should maybe do this with writing too, because maybe it’ll make me less precious and freaked out about my own work.
ZP: Haha. Yeah. There’s some debunked psychology behind this probably.
CP: Totally. Some pop theories of creativity. I think it’s real that you need to do things to shake up your thinking and be open to possibilities, and that’s one way to do it, to do multiple things at once.
Zach’s extant copy of jubilat 25 from 2014.
ZP: I felt pretty weird about doing this interview re: jubilat and publishing and community at first. Obviously it makes sense for me to do it because I went to UMass and there are these little connections, but also I’ve been sending stuff to jubilat forever and this past fall I finally got a poem accepted into the final issue. Of course the final issue is the one I make it into, haha. But it felt weird because in my gut it was like some conflict of interest or something? So I thought I should talk about that here, but then there was this worse-feeling feeling that I shouldn’t poke that too hard either, like this weird system has just now worked for me in this one small way so I shouldn’t interrogate it too much. Which is obviously part of a much, much bigger problem. But I want to ask you what you think the editor’s role is in this world where upstart journals can become a part of the professional infrastructure. Where we’re all trying to build up our publication records for our CVs and where in one sense taking a certain poem from a certain person is a type of endorsement, if not a step on an actual career path. Like, does that trouble you in some ethical way? I feel troubled by this question.
CP: I mean yeah troubled. I feel troubled by basically everything. Haha. But yes we have these conversations all the time, at jubilat and at the PC and at Rescue, about who we’re publishing and why and the process of it all. I’m not sure if I can speak for everyone exactly but as a personal stance on these kinds of ethical considerations in the context of jubilat, yes, we’ve published friends and colleagues and students, but that needs to be offset too. So if we’ve solicited some work from someone we know then we also take some work from people we don’t know. jubilat’s always had a stellar set of readers who pass along great poems from the submitted work, which the editors also spend time with. If we’ve taken work from someone with a bunch of books then we should also take something from someone who’s never published, etc. In a general sense we’re always trying to keep from getting stuck in patterns of publishing only particular kinds of work by only particular kinds of people. This is a good argument for having a variety of ways of acquiring work as well as a revolving set of readers or editors, of course. But more to your point regarding career paths, I think the founders of jubilat would laugh, probably in a good way, at the fact that it might be the kind of journal now that people would want to publish in for purely academic or professional reasons. I understand what you’re talking about though, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job of making something that follows our interests and aligns with a sense of responsibility to our readers and authors and artistic vision.
Caryl Pagel is the author of an essay collection, Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (FC2), and two books of poetry: Twice Told (University of Akron Press) and Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death (Factory Hollow Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in Conduit, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, The Paris Review, and The Rupture. Caryl is a co-founder and publisher at Rescue Press and a poetry editor at jubilat. She teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program.
Zach Peckham is a writer and musician from Massachusetts who quit his marketing job to study poetry in Ohio. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, The Lowell Son, Happiness Pony, @tuffpoems, Poetry Northwest, and on the Academy of American Poets website. He is a candidate in the NEOMFA where he works at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.