It took a little convincing for Richard to believe that we actually liked Wylie’s work, and while I was in a minority of students who were enthusiastic about Ransom, still this was more than Richard expected. After all, it isn’t just Ransom’s poetry that reads like an echo of long-gone days. Disdainful of free verse, Ransom was a man who cried out against “the fatal irritant of modernism” and indicted “we moderns” as “impatient” and “destructive.”

            The thing that struck me more than the pleasure I took in reading the work of Wylie and Ransom, though, was Richard’s timidity. To be sure, reading “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” in 2005 is like tolerating the dated production of a late-70’s Rick James record because you know the songs are great. But why did Richard fear revolt at the mere mention of poems like “Velvet Shoes”? Were Wylie’s conventional lyrical devices and rhyme schemes really so out of favor now as to incite the sort of ire Richard seemed so prepared for?

            These questions stuck with me for a long time, and I don’t think I fully answered them until reading the current issue of Octopus Magazine (issue #4). A quick look at the “submissions” link for any handful of poetry journals reveals that pervading editorial mantra, courtesy of the “moderns” whom Ransom implicated as conspirators against his craft: make it new. If you think editors are about to tell you what they mean by this, think again. That’s for you to figure out (good luck), but Octopus Magazine is a good place to start if you’re looking for answers.

            It didn’t take long for me to realize that this is the last place I could expect to find work like Wylie’s and Ransom’s. While not entirely an experimental magazine, Octopus Magazine does push beyond the boundaries of more established journals like Southern Review or Poetry. Issue #4 tries – and even succeeds at times – to recognize work that is “new” and more daring than anything even Ransom’s despised moderns envisioned.

            As Sarah Manguso writes in her poem “What is the Correct Subject”: “it’s time for a new mystery.” Octopus Magazine delivers that “new mystery” in such abundance that a distinctly new American poetry emerges. Though the aforementioned Sara Manguso’s work suggests the dry wit of Susan Wheeler and discovers as much possibility in white space as Franz Wright, still the work is wholly her own:

In Japan they tell a story of the rabbit whose job it is to clean the moon. His reason for doing so is obscure.

There exists a netsuke carving of a moon that, upside-down, becomes a rabbit that, upside-down, becomes a moon . . .

The guardians understood even more than this.

            Many poems in issue #4 defy the trusty “arc” we MFA students learned about – that digestible poem of the beginning, middle and end – in favor of fresh glimpses of a poetry that is on its way toward a new way of talking to us. Dale Smith’s dream-like “What The Tree Said Lifted” collects three pages-worth of vivid imagery and gestures whose stinging irony is as capable of darkness as it is of laughter. Smith’s short lines allow for precise, provocative line breaks, and his talent is such that he weaves so many fragmented parts into a cohesive if elusive story:

The leaves speak
Like you do. Here,
Then not, walking
A silver path.
There’s a dead pigeon
Rotting in damp grass
By a phone poll . . .

Ordered stout and whisky.
Slid a dollar in the jukebox.
Came Waylon Jennings.
Johnny Cash.
Hole.
A young woman leaned
Into a game machine.

            As with most ambitious collections, a sharp line is drawn between poems that try to be and poems that are. Michael Heller’s gorgeous “Isohel” does not depend on the structural quirks of Kirsten Kaschock’s “Baby Names: Girl F” or the magazine’s many column-shaped prose poems. There is something less distracting and more direct about “Isohel” that makes it one of the issue’s strongest poems, bringing an immaculate vocabulary to the work that is as precise as a tape measure:

To be catalogued by desire,
Loving even the self’s falsest myth;

Its rising to the mind with day.
Setting in moonlight, leaving one

With a requisite sadness. Words.
Even those inevitably borrowed,

Ringing in at least two heads.

            The issue’s most successful “experiments” are not in structures and devices, but rather in the language itself, the ability to wrest a single word out of its context and into meaning. Startling images are stumbled upon as if by accident; the truest observations are made from the fewest words, as with the image in Heller’s other poem, “Everything Translates,” of a “half-helix/of the ear where sound tickles” or of a “translator letting/the world’s noise enter/an intruder banging on the door.”

            But the most alluring aspect of issue #4 is its balance between the gravity of Heller’s work and rumors of “the Xerox god/the Parcheesi god/the Monopoly/god/the/Battleship god, and the/Chutes ‘n’/Ladders god” in G.C. Waldrep’s hilarious “Who Are The Gods” which, in case you were wondering, also includes “the green tea god,” “the follicle god” and “the denim god.”

            In addition to the vague demand for poets to “make it new,” editors also advise that submitters read their issues to get a sense for what they’re talking about. I can think of no better place to start than Octopus Magazine. Its current issue is eclectic and memorable enough to be representative of America’s latest “moderns” and what they’re doing.

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