"Serving an Underserved Part of the Poetry Community." A Chat With Quincy R. Lehr, Editor of The Raintown Review

Editor of long-standing poetry magazine shares his vision

Another editor interview has just wrapped!

Today I had the absolute delight of speaking with Quincy R. Lehr, Editor of The Raintown Review. Quincy and I have been online pals for sometime, but today was our first actual conversation. It was great to hear his views on politics, poetry, what makes his journal unique, and what he seeks in submissions.

We talked about how to transcend political rage in order to create meaningful and lasting art, his occasional “sonnet fatigue,” what some lit mags have done to “self-immolate,” and also what keeps him motivated as editor when so many other life responsibilities demand attention.

The Raintown Review is based in California and publishes formal poetry and criticism on a semi-annual basis. They are open for submissions, however they are currently between websites. (Best to check out their Facebook page for magazine information and updates.)

Quincy is actively seeking more poetry criticism, and he mentioned this is a great way to break into the magazine. If you are interested in reviewing poetry, that is also something they want. To send submissions or to become a reviewer, email theraintownreview@gmail.com.

The Raintown Review is a long-standing lit mag that is carving an important space for formal poetry. For more on Quincy’s personal vision of the magazine, check out his newly updated editorial statement below.

Thanks so much to Quincy for letting us see behind the curtain of his journal today.

To all who came out to attend the interview, thank you for tuning in! (And apologies for the abrupt end to the conversation. I meant to stop recording, not to shut off the whole meeting. Still mastering the technology, folks.)

Happy viewing!

FLY LIKE A MONSTER TRUCK!

I stomped away from my last editorial perch as associate editor of The Raintown Review in 2016. I’m sure if you asked Anna Evans, the outgoing editor, she’d say her mercurial-at-the-best-of-times second-in-command rediscovered left-wing sectarianism, went full brocialist, and went down in a blaze of swear words. But she’s full of shit. We’re still friends, by the way. In any event, Anna nonetheless persisted with the journal, even as she pursued electoral office in Democratic Party politics, continued to play a key role in the Poetry by the Sea Conference, and doubtless all sorts of other things I don’t know about, or forgot about, or that she told me about, but I wasn’t listening. But little magazines, as the saying should go if it doesn’t already, lead to big ulcers, and the torch was passed, alight if somewhat sputtering, to yours truly.

The corner of the poetry world to which those of us who use rhyme and meter are relegated is, to a greater extent than it has been in over a decade, editorially dominated by journals whose self-image is all Grecian columns, silly neckwear (not in the good way), and family crests with “Deus Vult” written on them, along with practical politics that are essentially a Grey Poupon commercial, only with Bill O’Reilly screaming the n-word for a soundtrack. On the other side, one has nepotistic Cliff’s Notes-Foucauldian Wokelords who have elevated not knowing what the hell you’re doing, promotion-by-clique, and a great deal of unacknowledged neoliberal privilege to what amounts to a Hillary Clinton campaign commercial cosplaying as an avant-garde manifesto. And it sucks ass.

Given the numerous looming existential threats to human life, our species’ time on the planet may well be too short for trying to pretend that there’s any point having an open mind about Buzzfeed or that Hamilton is anything other than imperialistic Schoolhouse Rock for the vaguely liberal middle and upper classes. The poetry world need not be a dichotomy between the next would-be Rupi Kaur on Instagram on the one hand and some bow-tie troglodyte with a pretentious Twitter handle and a book-length polemic against rhyming singular nouns with plural ones on the other. Nor need it try to split the difference. It’s time to be awkward and turn some human emoticons into frowny faces.

How does this affect what you, the reader, will see in the pages of the magazine going forward? On the one hand, expect a fair bit of continuity. After all, I was the associate editor for the greater part of a decade, and the 2009-2017 run of The Raintown was indicative of my tastes, or at least where congruent with those of Anna Evans—which was a pretty significant overlap. As for what I’d like to see more of…. It’s like this: my son, like many four-year-olds, has a thing for enormous, terrifying machinery. After seeing the Brodozer face off against the Undertaker, Max D, El Toro Loco, and similarly monikered vehicles (and after getting a fantastically irritating singing miniature version for his birthday), he has repeatedly declared his desire to fly, not like an eagle or a dove or some corny crap like that, but like a monster truck. And that’s what I’d like a bit more of—poems that fly like monster trucks, feats of prosodic engineering that are at turns impressive, hilarious, horrifying, and just deafeningly loud, spark-spewing mayhem.

The world is several shades beyond fucked at the moment, and The Raintown Review will include poetry that acknowledges that things are not only not okay, but that they haven’t been okay for a very long time. But let’s cause some mayhem and piss off a few Bozos anyway, because they suck, and it’s funny.

Speaking of Bozos, unless you have been particularly obtuse and possibly in a coma, you may have noticed that cops suck and should be defunded, that the capitalist system the cops defend is bad, and that racial inequality is a key prop of capitalist rule. What exactly this has to do with publishing poetry in a small journal is another question. We are, at the end of the day, a formalist-leaning poetry-and-prose-about-poetry magazine that happens to have an editorial staff of a leftward bent. That said, we are weighing the poems we include in the magazine on such things as craft, being, you know, interesting and attention-grabbing, filling a void I hadn’t necessarily even known existed until I read the poem in question. My opinions (and those of anyone reading the slush) about politics and matters of race, class, religion, gender, and all the rest are in the mix, but by no means the only or even primary criteria as to whether something is worth reading. The number of poets, from Yeats to Byron to Eliot to Pound to the Earl of Rochester to William fucking Shakespeare (Shylock, anyone?), who were into dodgy sex, bad politics, and just being pieces of shit is staggering. If you want to write any of these, much less all of these out of the literature on such a basis, you probably don’t like poetry very much. Not every poem seamlessly reflects an editor’s worldview, but each poem in this magazine was picked for reasons I thought good. If needs be said, any attempt to get me to “cancel” a poem or poet I publish based on something that runs in The Raintown Review, or any attempt to do the same to me if I fulfil the basic duty of an editor and stand by what we print, will be met with withering, contemptuous scorn. There are many, many things far more deserving of protest than a poetry magazine, and there are plenty of groups organizing to make the world a better place that you should consider joining.

Finally, a note on the production of this issue—between a new staff, a massive backlog in the slush pile when I took over, and Central Avenue Press effectively shutting down as the magazine got the kiss of life, getting it out was a chore. Attentive readers will note that the old volume-number format is gone, replaced by a single number, reflecting, in the main, that the twice-a-year format has been a bit of a joke for several years now. It is my hope that with a new publisher and a new team settling in, the speed and efficiency of the operation will improve. But I would rather have one issue come out a year and be a good issue than to try to force a second issue if my fortysomething, father-of-two ass can’t realistically do what I did when I was single, in my early thirties, and running on cheap red wine, nicotine, and hatred. I still have lowbrow tastes where the bottle is concerned, and there are still plenty of things that deserve loathing, but I quit smoking a long time ago, and I try to stay up late less often than heretofore.

—Quincy R. Lehr

Los Angeles, CA