the editor

Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of three full length collections of poetry: Heaven (winner of the 1999 Bakeless Prize), Harlot (2007, No Tell Books), and Necropolis (2008, NeoNuma Arts). Her most recent publication is a single poem chapbook, The Devastation (2009, Cooper Dillon Books). A former NEA literature fellow, Jill’s poems have appeared in many journals. Her poem “Apologia” was chosen for the 2010 edition of The Best American Poetry. Currently she is at work on a novel and a fourth collection of poetry. Jill lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches in the UCR Palm Desert Low Residency MFA program.

Note from the editor:

I answered Nic Sebastian’s call for help with editing her manuscript almost without even having to consider it. I read the request on Reb Livingston’s blog and I thought: Of course I will help her! I had just returned to the United States after living (unhappily) in Europe for a couple of years. My own poetry career (inasmuch as one can make a ‘career’ out of poetry) had sputtered and briefly stalled. I thought – quite earnestly, quite literally – that it would please The Muse should I offer my editorial eye to this woman who wanted very much to put into the world her own poems at their very best. And who doesn’t want to please The Muse? Truth be told, I’m a very good editor. I’ve always prided myself on being able to edit, suggest, guide a poet’s poems not toward my own specific bents (and they are indeed specific, my preferences and aesthetic), but rather toward the poem’s own. Being able to help a poem, in fact, become more of itself, its author. To shepherd it into its fullest self.

And so our process began. Nic sent me her manuscript, I read it twice over a few months’ time, I marked it up, I mailed it back to her. Then, over the next few months, she’d revise, adjust, reconsider, and send it finally back to me and we would repeat this process once again. We went through this cycle three full times.

Nic’s poems were fantastic to begin with. There was very little restructuring I suggested. Here I would encourage her to tease an image out; there I would scribble notes like ack! and gah! over a single word choice I found less than ideal. Sometimes she’d take the editorial suggestion; other times she would not. By no means was this a collaborative process. Nic’s poems are all her own. My own role was–is– to provide the trusted feedback of another set of eyes, another pair of ears.

One interesting thing that happened as this process unfolded: my own aesthetic—heretofore generally formal, typically straightforward and non-elliptic, always concerned with usage and grammatical style, perhaps (dare I?) stuffy, even—changed. It opened. It widened. It evolved. This is what can happen when poets work together.

But the question is invariably raised, as perhaps it should be: what legitimizes this approach to publishing, the nanopress model as Nic has envisioned it? Does it need to be legitimized? Who says so? Who makes these rules? For—and let’s be honest—it doesn’t matter how spectacular the book, if it’s self-published it’s going to get a sneer or two. Why do we let the nay-sayers nay? Why do we care?

Let’s face another few facts. It’s tricky to get a press to publish a book. There will always be more contest losers than there are winners. Even if you hook a press or win a prize, you may not have the level of control over the construction of the artifact of your book (its cover, font, size, overall design) you’d prefer to enjoy. And just because the one book gets published there is no guarantee the next one will. Why not, then, take the bull by its pointy, proverbial horns and make your own way, your own splash, your own place in the tight but complicated world that we as poets share? The benefits of having an outside editor are obvious. But what, I think, is less evident is what a good and solid and bold and purpose-fulfilling idea this is. An idea brimming with guts and moxie.

But: the poems. Nic Sebastian’s poems are not static. They move and they tremble. They dance and they shudder. They play both ends against the middle, and the middle is a sort of fight-back beast that no one’s ever seen, that few believe to exist. They are and are not rooted in place. While many of the poems are situated in physical locations, it is the geographies of the heart’s happiness (and, by obverse extent, its unhappiness) over which she rambles, in which she makes camp, upon which she plants a citizenry’s flag. The banner is her own. The I is lioness-strong and owns an owl’s ocular prowess. Thus, it is difficult to separate the author from these poems. How could one? Why would one? And who would want to?

Not I. Not I.

Jill Alexander Essbaum
December 2010