Denunciation will make me powerful!

One of my students is headed back to Venezuela this weekend. She said if she ever starts her own company and becomes rich, she will be my patron.

Harlequin Knights reports that, at a recent UCLA lecture, Zizek castigated all the "experimental American poets" who are in love with Hugo Chavez. My student is not in love with Hugo Chavez and neither am I. Like Joseph, I wonder who he means. However, some of us must be prone to a romantic love of his rhetoric, that seems certain.

Here in the San Diego suburbs, having recently returned from a trip to Target, it's tempting to get all teary-eyed about Chavez addressing a crowd of protesters in his customary red shirt screaming "Gringo, go home!" or "Those who want to go directly to hell, they can follow capitalism" and "Those of us who want to build heaven here on earth, we will follow socialism."

This fire and brimstone rhetoric appeals to my Feminist WASP guilt complex. Yes, yes, I think, let the denunciations continue! Denounce me! I want to be denounced!

But I'm also tired, and have just had a big capitalist breakfast.

I work hard. And a lot. I want a big capitalist breakfast and also health care.

I wonder where a journal like Cross-Cultural Poetics might stand (or have stood) on loving Chavez or not. Has there been a recent issue of XCP?

In fact, what are the current magazines that feature a combination of poetry, critical pieces, reviews, and other stuff. I mean magazines in the tradition (if I can even say that) of XCP, Chain, Tripwire, Ecopoetics, Tinfish, Verdure, The Poker Magazine, Jacket, How2....

I have a copy of Pilot 2006 on my desk that I'm still going through. This might count. A fairly wide range of material. A fairly rigorous attempt at discussing poetics. Uneven but risky, so I like it.

Well. Given my list, it looks like that when I talk about magazines "that feature a combination of poetry, critical pieces, reviews, and other stuff" I often mean magazines connected to Buffalo. Or, magazines edited by people who are well versed in experimental poetics since 1920.

With the exception of Jacket and How2, I don't think any of the magazines above would make my favorites list. But Lorraine, what are your favorite contemporary magazines that are still active/in print? Um, um...

How2
Jacket
Foursquare
Tarpaulin Sky
Pilot
Big Bridge
Fiction International
Submodern Fiction (which, yes, Mark edits and I will soon co-edit and which is on hiatus but will have another issue by this fall)