POET-EDITORS/ 17


Thomas Fink

Thomas Fink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Clarity and Other Poems, as well as a 2010 collaboration with Maya Diablo Mason, Autopsy Turvy, and two books of criticism. With Tuzyline Jita Allan, he edited Literature Around the Globe, and with Joseph Lease, he edited Burning Interiors: David Shapiro's Poetry. Fink also edited the Selected Poems of Mark Young and of Jack Lynch.

What is (or has been) your favorite editing project and why?

I have only served as an editor thrice, and each experience was rewarding. My favorite editing project was the first—an anthology that Tuzyline Jita Allan did for introductory literature courses. It was called Literature Around the Globe (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1994), and it may have been the first such anthology including poetry, fiction, and drama in the U.S. that featured writers of varying races and ethnicities not only from the U.S. but from South and Central America, Africa, the Near East, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Far East. However, within a year or so, other textbooks cropped up. In this pre-internet era, it was such a pleasure to search for and learn about authors from groups or nations whose literature was unfamiliar to me, and Tuzyline and I had a terrific time figuring out who was “in” and in which of the five thematically configured sections we would place them.

---

NONCE SONNET 11


                                                           Fulmi
                                                             nations 
                                                               against a 
                                                                  buttoned
                                                                          down 
                                             oligarchy                collect  
                                       at least moderate             notice 
                                    from those  plopped             before 
                                the sizzling slots. But some        fleeced 
                             by doctrines of  sour  gripes &          gropes 
                           won’t deign to assess analytic core           within 
                       the shouting. After he chopped off thous        ands of
                    heads and saw  ‘em growing  back,  Jeremiah         drafted
                 a deathbed confession:  “I fed my  post-adolescent    obsession
               with the apocalyptic,  till losing cool became a profess        ional 
             trademark, skid mark—too much a glee store for the loser.     Had I 
          spoken  twice or thrice from a situationist clearing, had I tried
        empathic nods  to common  frailty or slipped  into the cryptic or 
      Socratic, those boozing  masses would have. . . .”  No, that  prophet 
    bolstered the most  abstract  patriarchal yoke;  he’s an  example best  re
  maindered in the nineteenth  century U.S. wilderness or  frontier,  so that a 
godless left  can poke  freely  at ordinary capitalists’ and  their admirers’ flanks.

HAY(NA)KU EXFOLIATION 9


Spine
grunt donating
a minimal animal—
what never
jutted in public

text. Post cremation, this
will have come
to form crookedly in
The Collected Lemons, glossy education

rubbed to gray matte,
ordinary sanities thundering banality (florid),
secret exercises fed to inertial tunnels.

Next Poet-Editor, Luis H. Francia
Back to Poet-Editor index

 
 
previous page     contents     next page