How to be sure none of your friends’ll be able to chat with you ’bout what you’ve been reading: Read back issues of obscure, small circulation lit mags like Combo.

It’s fun reading, still. In issue 13 (winter/ spring 2004), I found a fascinating interview with Jerome Rothenberg — the poet who edited Poems for the New Millennium, among other anthologies — in which he says he got into poetry because:

I came to believe that poetry was involved with a search for an alternative form of language and consciousness, a feeling that our language both semantically and structurally and ideologically was corrupt and implicated in the devastation that we had just come through [after WWII].

So he got interested in “people like Stein, Cummings, Joyce — people who made alternative languages.”

Alternative languages are very invigorating — though the problem is, if you invent your own language, no one else will know how to speak it — at least initially. The conversations can get lonely — kind of like reading back issues of Combo can get lonely.

Though poems aren’t bad company –

And if cars were never invented, would you still appear
closer than you really are?

– Catherine Meng, from “Tonight’s the Night (3)”

Off to socialize –

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