This is an (edited) extract from a very long response to a questionnaire sent me by Matt Chambers, who was doing a feature on the journal for a class on contemporary poetry. It dates from 2002 so it’s now out of date in spots. (N.D. Dec 2004)

1) could you give me a brief bio. &/or timeline of how and why "the gig" got started? what was the impetus? why this particular format? etc.

A little bio: I’m from Halifax, Nova Scotia (born 1974), my parents running a music shop called the Halifax Folklore Centre. The interest in contemporary poetry was the result of a class on contemporary British poetry taught by Michael Kirkham at U of Toronto, where I did my M.A. The lineup on the course didn’t have any authors from the avantgarde – it was Hughes, Hill, Tomlinson & Bunting – but by chance I came across J. H. Prynne via Davie’s book on Hardy, which Kirkham suggested I read for a paper on Tomlinson. I didn’t understand the stuff at all, which is why I was intrigued, especially as Davie clearly was baffled by it too: he refers to Prynne’s “The Ideal Star-Fighter” as “the only poem from his most recent book I think I understand” (I’m quoting from memory).

Initially I drew a blank with the work after getting it from the library & gave up on it; only after coming across Prynne’s name again as the mentor of Veronica Forrest-Thomson (in the prefatory note to Edwin Morgan’s poem for her in The New Divan) did I start realizing that Prynne wasn’t just some inexplicable maverick no-one had ever heard of. I read him & her, & pulled down every reference book at U of T in the contemporary poetry & literature sections looking for references; I combed through PN Review, where two reviews of Prynne’s Poems appeared; after a lot of effort I found a reference to A Various Art, which finally gave me the first view of a scene, a writers’ community, in which this kind of poetry was created & circulated & which was almost entirely off the radar of conventional anthologies & histories (as I came quickly to realize, was actively repressed from such canonical guides). – A glance through the index of Perloff’s Radical Artifice turned up one passing reference to Prynne (in the introduction) & I realized the book would help me figure out how to deal with “difficult” modern poetry. So I came to language poetry backwards, after the British work. – PN Review published a review by Geoff Ward of the first CCCP (Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry), & it had Peter Riley’s address in it for buying books. I wrote him, & started buying books & discussing them & receiving advice from him.

I ended up going to Dalhousie in Halifax for the PhD, actually deciding to write on Prynne & the rest of A Various Art’s crew. I never finished the degree, & I’ve since moved back to Toronto, but I’ve been doing a little academic work anyway – notably the OUP anthology I worked on with Keith Tuma (see below).

The magazine was started in late 1998. The immediate source of my decision to start the magazine was receiving an email from the Irish poet Trevor Joyce with two long prose poems that I thought were truly marvellous. I’d met Trevor in 1996 at the New Hampshire conference; I’d never heard of him or his work before but I’d liked his reading there & he gave me his book stone floods; reading that book & then receiving Syzygy in an email from him gradually made me realize that he was in fact a major writer whom no-one knew about & whom I wanted to publicize a little; when the prose poems arrived then I turned around & asked to publish them. They appeared, with a 3rd poem that completed the series, as Hopeful Monsters in the 1st issue.

But there’s more background to the decision to start the magazine. I’d also just been hired by Keith Tuma (whom I’d corresponded with in 1995, helping out with the chapter on contemporary UK poetry in Fishing by Obstinate Isles, & we met in 1996 at New Hampshire too) to work as an annotator & adviser for his Oxford UP anthology (eventually published in Feb. 2001 as Anthology of 20th-Century British and Irish Poetry). Until then I’d been falling out of contact with the poetry scene; hadn’t been reading much or buying poetry books, had been basically planning to concentrate on being a professional jazz pianist & letting the PhD drop, & hadn’t been corresponding much with poets & critics I knew; the only way I kept in touch at the time was the British-Poets email discussion list. All of a sudden I was massively rereading all this poetry, as my job in the initial stages was to brainstorm possible names, make tons of xeroxes for Keith from my own (enormous) collection of British poetry or from the library here, render snap or considered judgments on authors & poems, ask knowledgable friends like Peter Riley & Pete Smith for advice, &c. This of course proved a useful stimulus & background to editing the magazine.

And another thing to keep in mind is that one reason I’d been out of touch with the UK poetry scene was that the little-magazine scene there had gotten much thinner by the end of 1998. The magazines that I had loved & learned from & that had kept me in touch had mostly folded or gone quiet: the 2nd series of Pages had wound up; fragmente was starting to have one-or-two-year gaps between issues (issue 8, which turned out to be the final one, was published in 1998, but I didn’t see it till after The Gig 1 came out; Robin Purves very kindly posted a positive review of The Gig 1 & fragmente 8 to the British-Poets listserv); Parataxis had ended on a high point with issue 8/9 (1996; this was announced as the final issue, but Drew Milne finally revived it in 2001). Andrew Duncan’s Angel Exhaust was still going but was less interesting than before, & eventually folded after one more issue (#17, the Irish poetry issue, edited by John Goodby & Maurice Scully – I’ve learned to recognize the signs of editorial exhaustion when a magazine is turned over to guest editors . . . Duncan’s only role in it was the exceptionally ghastly & typoridden typesetting). Object Permanence, a marvellous journal out of Glasgow run by Robin & Peter Manson, had just ended. (As it turns out very few UK journals have risen to replace those losses since 1998: really only Quid, which is to my thinking the single best UK little magazine publishing right now. Possibly The Gig, which I know some UK readers consider almost an honorary British magazine, has settled into this ecological niche in a way I hadn’t envisaged at the time, & thus possibly it’s made the need for new UK-based mags in a similar format less pressing. The Cambridge scene certainly seems less lively than it was in the early 1990s, except for the Barque/Quid crowd – recent CCCPs have been patchy, for instance.)

The Gig was at first going to be called Don’t Explain, after a Billie Holiday-associated tune that I liked playing on piano; the current title was a suggestion of Pete Smith’s, in tribute to the Clusone 3’s performance of the Herbie Nichols tune of that title. Funnily enough, I’d originally intended the magazine to be basically a showcase of poetry, especially UK & Irish poetry, for a North American audience, with no critical component beyond brief reviews. I say “funnily enough” because virtually all the UK magazines I’d admired were importantly, often primarily, focussed on critical writing. (Of the magazines I list above, only Object Permanence had no essay component; instead, its legendary review section – most books dispatched in a single paragraph of intelligent, funny & sometimes witheringly negative prose – was the main model for The Gig’s reviews section, though I’ve never achieved its pithiness or bite.) The essay in #1 was due to a fortuitous misunderstanding: I’d solicited poems from John Wilkinson, & also asked if I could read his paper on Wieners as I’d missed it at New Hampshire due to crossscheduling. I’d not intended to solicit the paper, but John sent it as a submission with the poems since at the time it looked like it would not be published in the conference proceedings (they’d requested it be revised into a formal academic paper, & he didn’t have the time; however, I gather that the still-forthcoming incredibly delayed volume will have the paper). The letter of solicitation I sent out to all invitees specifically said I was willing to print long pieces & was interested in doing so, & so issue #1 has a lot of sequence-length writing, by Joyce, Peter Riley, Wilkinson, Halsey (due to space limitations I only did a short excerpt from Maurice Scully’s project – I’d typeset much more). It’s still one of the most impressive issues, I think. (I hate magazines with primarily one- or two-page selections – the choppy rhythm, especially, & the way such tiny snippets make it hard to gauge what an author’s style & preoccupations are.)

The physical format of the magazine is the way it is because it’s cheap & convenient. (Thinking back, I wonder why I didn’t do it in 8.5 x 11 format – but that would have made it expensive to mail, though it’s the best way to present poems. Half a legal-size sheet is also a popular format in chapbook mags, but I hate it, maybe just because it’s floppy in the hand, maybe because I like the proportions of 8.5 x 5.5, the half-letter size I use. For the “documents” series I’ve done, I’ve used the 8.5 x 11 format as it makes for more pleasant reading in books intended for reference & research use.) Physically, the regular issues are a lot like OP & the early issues of Parataxis & fragmente before they went to perfectbinding (& became painfully irregular in their appearance: a lesson here). It’s rather plain-looking by the standards of US & Canadian magazines – I was starting this up in the heyday of magazines like The Germ & Raddle Moon. But subscriptions alone can’t possibly pay for slick print jobs, & I’m never going to get public funding for the magazine – in Canada, this would require publishing mostly Canadian poetry – & in any case my impression was that filling out forms & trying to lobby bureaucrats for money would use up my own energy & time. Ditto private fundraising parties, launches, &c. Appeals for funds are limited to the special booklength volumes, such as the Peter Riley issue (#4/5) & the Raworth (#13/14). I nonetheless try to keep every issue, even in the cheapo xeroxed chapbook format, visually attractive, most importantly by the elimination of all typos & typesetting errors (all contributors receive proofs & are asked to check them carefully).

Last word: the magazine is a maximum of 64pp with ivory card cover, because with a one-page cover letter & an envelope it weight about 98 grams; the subscription costs are gauged to a 100-gram packet. My experience is anyway that a single editor would be very hard pressed to assemble more than 64pp x 3 issues = 192pp of good material in a single year; to do more would require multiple editors.

2) since you do not accept unsolicited manuscripts, how do you go about deciding who to solicit? i know there is the uk focus, but what other “constraints” are you working with?

I have to go back to my time at Dalhousie here, as I omitted something important. There was a graduate student journal called Critical Mass run out of the English department there, & I joined it. Like any journal edited by graduate students, it suffered a lot from editorial turnover as people graduated or left to work harder on their thesis; by the time I joined, the official editorial board of 8 people had basically fallen apart, & one student, an older, Type-A kind of guy (he’d left a managing job – I think it was in K-Mart or Zellers or something) named Nick Mount was left doing all the work because no-one else could be bothered to show up for meetings or read MSS &c. He got the journal back into good shape – subscription lists & finances nicely organized, mailouts done promptly & thoroughly, &c. – asked new people to join the board, & started to change the journal: under his editorship & leadership, we junked the title (we decided on Henry Street, the address at the time of the English department), decided to shift the content towards more “personal” styles of writing than mechanical grad-student papers, tried very hard to get it indexed in the MLA (we succeeded in this) & to get library subscriptions (we failed here). I ended up doing all the typesetting & a lot of the copyediting, which was to prove useful for The Gig. We usually had a three-person editorial board, with Sharon Hamilton first & then a woman whose name escapes me right now.

Anyway, this all proved instructive because I learned two things. 1) It was great working with Nick but I found that it did take a lot of energy to discuss & sometimes argue over submissions with him & the 3rd member. 2) We quickly discovered that calls for papers generate vast piles of submissions but only a tiny fraction of them were at all worthwhile. It got to the point where despite our receiving 50-60 submissions & our diligently reading through them, we’d maybe take two or three & then have to either include some of our own work (sometimes under pseudonyms) or pester friends for work. (One issue of the journal has several quasi-poems of mine under a pseudonym. I don’t in fact write poetry – I’m probably in a considerable minority of poetry magazine editors in being a nonpoet – so these were in fact quasi-aleatoric poems I’d generated & then edited into shape from random phrases, originally written for my own amusement but pulled out of the drawer when we needed to fill an issue.)

I’m sure that conclusions 1) & 2) are obvious enough, but the experience stuck with me. When it came to The Gig my policy decisions were informed by my experiences at Henry Street. With a single unpaid editor (me) trying to put it out 3 times a year, I needed to keep energy & enthusiasm levels high. (As you’ll know, burnout rates in little mag circles are massive, & it is the rare little mag that gets beyond issue 3. I remember getting a letter back at the time of #3 where the correspondent automatically assumed I’d end the journal at issue #4/5!) Furthermore, the original motive was more to showcase poetries that I thought were important & insufficiently well-known in North America – i.e. to give exposure to what I knew needed circulation rather than wait to see what came in the mail. I suppose one could see this as absurdly arrogant, but of course there’s no shortage of magazines that are open to unsolicited submissions. (Though in point of fact, I’ve noticed that such magazines often have less variety of work & names & nationalities than The Gig . . . )

OK, back to your question. The “U.K.” focus is somewhat de facto – that’s the work I know best, & so I tend to invite people whose work I know & like. The ideal issue would actually be balanced: 1/3rd UK/Irish, 1/3rd US, 1/3rd Canadian, with the gender balance 50/50. My single favourite issue, #7, is like that. But it doesn’t always, or even often work out that way, & in particular the last 3 issues, especially #8, have been extremely far from that balance. All I can say is that the invitations I issued were balanced! (Believe it or not, issue #8 was supposed to be a Canadian poetry feature, with an essay on the KSW & poetry from a variety of Canadian authors. After the complete failure of any of the stuff to turn up, I had to quickly call in a number of friends, which is why it’s the first issue to contain a number of “repeat” names. I normally try to avoid establishing a familiar “stable” of authors.) I have not, however, tried to preserve a balance of ethnicities: that’s a feature of the journal about which I’m not at all comfortable . . . er, next question.

“General constraints”? Hm. At this point the term “experimental” or “avant-garde” poetry is a little ridiculous, given that it’s more or less a recognizable genre & tradition, but I suppose that is what I publish. (I have a strong hatred of the word “innovative” in this context, in its smug progressivist implications about the inherent newness of certain stylistic devices & aesthetic models: “The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative North American Poetry” for instance: ick.) I have strong sympathies with efforts to cross the divide between mainstream & avantgarde, if they’re in good faith & not simply toothless efforts to please everybody or types of literary politicking. But The Gig is not involved in this endeavour: the boundaries it’s traversing are the transAtlantic ones within the genre of experimental poetry. The mainstream/avantgarde divide, especially in the UK, seems to me close to intractable, though some progress has been made in some quarters (for instance, I’m expecting the new editors of Poetry Review, Robert Potts & David Herd, to be much more sympathetic to modernist & avantgarde poetries than the ghastly Peter Forbes [as indeed proved to be the case –ed.]). I’m not sure how one might easily start to pick away at it. But I think I can do a fair bit to get avantgardes on both sides of the Atlantic in better touch with one another, & that this is a useful thing to do.

So that’s the rough territory. Within it: I decide to invite poets I admire, of course, but try to balance things. Avoid poets I’ve seen in every single mag I’ve picked up, or who appear frequently in journals like the London Review of Books or other major periodicals – unless I deeply admire their work. (Make that their current work.) Avoid stuffing the magazine with friends. Avoid an entire issue of obscure names – the ideal is to place authors of widely varying reputation but consistent quality next to each other. Ask people for advice: Pete Smith (an expat Brit who’s now in BC) was especially important to early issues, putting me on to numerous Vancouver authors & others – looking at the tables of contents, I can say that his suggestions were fully or partially responsible for the inclusion of Lissa Wolsak, Susan Clark, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Keston Sutherland & Martin Corless-Smith (& let’s not forget his two fine poems in issue #1, & his reviewing for virtually every issue). Every magazine should have a review section, as you often discover authors you want to invite because you receive their books: Tim Davis in #6 is an example. (I reviewed his Dailies in #7, but received it first; I try to avoid putting reviews of an author in the same issue as poems of theirs. That’s possibly perverse, I know, but is essential to avoiding the appearance of a journal’s being in existence to promote a stable of authors – see my comments above.) Get a hold of other journals, via money or barter. Going to readings often wasn’t an option here in Toronto (we have a surprisingly drab literary scene here for the most part, & the regular reading series all died during the magazine’s life, though a new one has just begun in the last few months, the Lexiconjury series [which is still going strong as of 2004 –ed.]) but if you can, go to readings by unfamiliar authors. Push yourself to avoid repetition. Avoid everything being similar in tone or style: within the territory “experimental poetry” the range is very broad, so don’t put 6 Bruce Andrews acolytes or 6 J. H. Prynne students in a row. Issue #3 has Andrews and Thomas A. Clark, for instance. #10 [the most recent issue at the time I wrote this] has Tom Pickard writing post-Bunting objectivist haiku about backbreaking labour, & Carla Harryman writing extraordinarily obliquely about free jazz, & Buck Downs’s funny & frightening little poems (including a striking little piece on the Sep 11 attacks, & a piss-take on Creeley), & Gilbert Adair’s truly bizarre homorhythmic read-through of Blake’s Milton. Try to imagine juxtapositions of authors that would be interesting & striking & ring true.