If you’re a regular listener to NPR you know Scott Simon, the wonderfully-voiced host of Saturday’s Weekend Edition. Back in June he tweeted a picture of himself in which he was wearing a long sleeve tee shirt that said The Paris Review. I happened to see it and I loved it. I hadn’t thought about The Paris Review in ages, but I’m not surprised in the least that Scott Simon would be a fan. I want one of those shirts now.
The Paris Review is a little journal that began publishing in 1953 and directed its efforts to literature and poetry, mostly of a modernism bent. It published Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, Adrienne Rich, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Larkin, and many others. It ran lengthy interviews with writers like Ralph Ellison and Ernest Hemingway. After 20 years publishing out of Paris it relocated its headquarters to New York City. For its first 50 years of existence, George Plimpton—like Scott Simon someone whose voice you would instantly recognize if not his name—served as its editor.
When I took creative writing classes in my undergrad days, for both poetry and short fiction The Paris Review was one of our regular sources of inspiration, and it gave us insight into current trends in writing. I’m happy to learn it’s still in publication and, moreover, now has a good and interesting website as well.
Publications like The Paris Review are known as “little magazines” because they have small circulation, a focused audience at which they aim, and are not understood to be profit-making enterprises – something that seems incomprehensible to our materialistic profit-driven culture.
Poet Ezra Pound whose work often appeared in The Paris Review said that the more a magazine values profit, the less it’s willing to experiment with things that aren’t yet acceptable to a mainstream readership. A focus on profit narrows what a magazine will publish. This is not good for the arts.
In 2017, Professor Michael Barsanti, writing in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, described little magazines as “a place where writers of new, unusual, and often iconoclastic work could get into print.” The goal of such publications was artistic far more than commercial.
He describes the year 1912, when a little magazine called Poetry: A Journal of Modern Verse began publishing in Chicago, as a watershed in the genre. For the next several years, little magazines “enjoyed a period of frenetic activity and diversification,” as they competed with each other “to lead the avant-garde of a new movement.” Poetry was the first journal to publish one of T.S. Eliot’s poems.
Such outlets were, and remain, an incubator for new art and therefore of critical importance to a healthy arts scene.