Vince Gotera, Poetry Editor of North American Review
Jendi Reiter conducted this exclusive email interview with Vince Gotera, the poetry editor of North American Review and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. His publication credits include the poetry collection Dragonfly (Pecan Grove Press, 1994) and Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans (University of Georgia Press, 1994), a book of literary criticism.
Founded in 1815 and currently published by the University of Northern Iowa, NAR is America's oldest literary magazine. NAR sponsors the James Hearst Poetry Prize, an individual-poems contest with a top prize of $1,000 and publication. This year's final judge is former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Other past judges have included Denise Duhamel and Li-Young Lee.
James Hearst was a well-known "farmer-poet" - a friend to other poets of his time, including Robert Frost. Before his death in 1983, Hearst published numerous poems and books and taught poetry writing at the University of Northern Iowa.
Q: Tell me about the history of NAR. Who were its original publishers, and how did it end up at the University of Northern Iowa?
A: The North American Review was founded in 1815 by Boston lawyer William Tudor, who also served as its original editor. It was renowned as a venue where politics of all shades and colors could be discussed. The NAR also published poetry, fiction, reviews, along with articles on current events and politics. Some of its more famous editors from the nineteenth century include James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Adams, and Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1878, the magazine moved from Boston to New York. At this time, such noted figures as Thomas Edison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson appeared in the NAR's pages. Some sixty years later, the NAR was bought by Joseph Hilton Smyth, who was later prosecuted as a spy for the Japanese government. The NAR went into hiatus until its revival in 1964, when Cornell College bought the NAR and began publishing it with the approval of the corporation that then owned the magazine. In 1968, the NAR was bought by the University of Northern Iowa, where it has resided since. After its revival in 1964, through today, the NAR has been a literary magazine as we think of it these days, focusing mainly on poetry, fiction, reviews of books and films, and nonfiction articles pertaining to the current scene, political and otherwise.
Q: What is your current circulation, and who would you consider your target audience?
A: The NAR circulation is in that industry niche—under 5,000. Our target audience are readers of literature. Our mission statement is: "At the North American Review, we work to make literature and art matter."
Q: What were the most significant changes in NAR's style and guiding vision over the many years of its existence, and what, if anything, has stayed the same?
A: The NAR is the second oldest magazine in the US. Only the Saturday Evening Post is older. Perhaps the most significant change is that before 1964, the NAR was probably more like today's Atlantic Monthly, a forum for political and social expression where poetry and fiction also appear. The NAR's focus leans more heavily now toward literature and art, though we still pride ourselves on providing a forum for free expression about social, national, and international issues.
Q: How would you describe NAR's current aesthetic preferences and editorial mission? Given that the contest is judged by a different guest poet each year, do you intend/expect that the contest winners will also reflect the "NAR style"?
A: We simply strive to find the best in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and art. We don't actively lean toward any aesthetic preferences other than that the work works. In poetry, the NAR is open toward experimental and avant-garde writing as well as more traditional verse, free verse as well as rhyme and meter. We like having different guest poets judge the James Hearst Poetry Prize each year because we want to expand our vision of poetry—we want to publish as many voices and types of poetry as we can.
Q: Who does the initial screening for the James Hearst Poetry Prize? How many entries do you usually get, and what proportion are forwarded to the final judge?
A: The initial screening is done by NAR staff members and also students of creative writing and literature at the University of Northern Iowa. We make sure that every poem is considered by at least two readers as well as myself. We get about 1,500 poems each year and we send 15-20 finalists to the final judge. So the finalists comprise about 1% or greater...incidentally, we publish all winners and finalists.
Q: Contests currently dominate the poetry publishing scene, and have become the main way for most poets to get books published or achieve recognition. Leaving aside the economic reasons for publishers to run contests, do you think this trend has been good or bad for writers? How does the emphasis on contests affect the type of work that gets written and published?
A: I think the trend is good for writers because it increases the number of places where one can publish. We started the Hearst Prize at the NAR because we wanted to get many different kinds of poetry. At that time (2000) most of the poems we were getting matched what poets saw as the "NAR style." I hope by now we have exploded that stereotype.
Q: The fine poetry in your most recent prizewinners' issue reminded me of Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, poets whose popularity has engendered criticism that their so-called "accessible" style talks down to readers. What do you think of this debate?
A: That's a silly debate. People who say Mary Oliver or Billy Collins are talking down to readers have an elitist notion of what poetry is and for whom it exists. Poetry should be accessible to all readers who want to put in the time to understand it. If that means some poetry is difficult and scholarly, so be it—those writers will find a readership. If other poetry is accessible and down-to-earth, great—those poets will also have an audience.
Q: Name some of your favorite contemporary authors. What do you think aspiring writers can learn from them?
A: I'm afraid I don't like to play the contemporary-author game. Aspiring writers need to find their own models. My tip would be to just read as widely as you can in contemporary poetry (and also poetry of the past) from a variety of nations and cultures.
Q: Any other advice for contestants?
A: As we say in our contest guidelines: watch out for the long poem. More can go wrong in that larger space. Obviously lots can go wrong in a tight lyric as well, but I find that the best work we encounter at the NAR, both in the Hearst Prize entries and in the poems that come in "over the transom," are poems that are one to two pages or shorter. We have nevertheless published poems of many pages, so we are open to a range of poem lengths. The poet should simply write what she or he needs to write, and do it so that readers feel as if, as Emily Dickinson put it, "the tops of their heads have been taken off."
Fall 2004
