Limbic magazine makes its debut

Poetry is written alone, behind closed doors and under bad lighting. Editing poetry is therefore a difficult task, often acrimonious, as editor and poet spar over publishability and artistic intent. The ideal for a journal is thematic unity, because reading a journal without a guiding theme is like having short, non-sequitur conversations with 50 people in succession. Brilliant voices get lost in mediocre babble. But the opposite problem might be worse: like a grade school teacher's prompt, an editorial board may decide that every poem must deal with "Love" or "overcoming adversity," and the poets' individual voices are distorted for the greater good.

The most sensitively edited journal I have ever read is sitting on my desk. It is bound in parchment and tied together with vermilion string. There is a block print in the same color on the front with the word "limbic" appearing in reverse type in a serif font. The contributing editor's thumbprint appears on the inside of the back cover. The design is as obsessive as the editing.

The thumbprint belongs to Frank Quinn, a recent graduate of Notre Dame and an employee of the Princeton University Press. Two years ago, he advertised a poetry workshop that met for the first time in Small World in the chaotic five minutes before closing time. Quinn announced his intention to have a poetry journal put together by the end of the semester. The Daily Princetonian mentioned the magazine, then untitled, on Nov. 22, 2002. Two years later, over 200 poems from the workshop's meetings had been sifted through and 16 chosen for first volume.

"Handling poems correctly is a huge responsibility for an editor," Quinn told me in Palmer Square, fiddling with his scarf. He informally tags many of his statements "man," but is honestly terrified by me in my capacity as reviewer. "Editing is treading very softly," he said, adding that it is "a dialogue" in which the poet is expected to win. He is a poet himself, but lacks any sort of affectation except for occasional turns of phrase. For example, he dismissed printing an online edition by saying he did not want people to read the journal "on a website under humming lights."

What does "limbic" mean? Quinn calls it a "non-definition," meaning that it is a unifying structure for the journal without being a limitation on the poets. He decries limiting a poet's creativity as "offensive editing" because "the role of the poet is continual self doubt, and there can be no theorem, no x equals..." The title "Limbic" does in fact refer to the Limbic system in the brain, whose individual components have functions that scientists still debate. The journal is organized in four sections entitled "hippocampus," "thalamus," "hypothalamus" and "amygdala," with four poems in each section. The next volume will have five sections of five poems each, the next six-by-six and the last seven-by-seven. At first glance this seemed like the very "offensive editing" that Quinn detests, but accepting the structure's vague rigidity brings the poems to an uncannily individuated unity.

Edmund White, the director of the University's Program in Creative Writing, is taken with Quinn's "compulsive" organization and "maniacal obsession with words." Like me, what struck him about the journal was how the work of very talented poets, all new poets, could join together without the authors' losing their individuality. In his six years here, he has never seen anything like it, he said.

"Seven poets temporarily sacrificed the idea of the singular originality of their poetry and made it possible to map an originality more fully articulated," Quinn wrote in the foreword. One would be hard pressed to find a more concise statement about what "Limbic" is. The tasteful juxtaposition of poems brings out entirely new meanings in them, especially in those poised on the breaks between sections. When hippocampus ("memory") gives way to thalamus ("motivation"), the first poem ends with the image of a lady sweeping the floor of a coffee shop and the next begins, "Ruby was who you went to, to get rid of extra shifts." I feel the two people are one; they become one, although the two poems were written completely independently by different writers. The form of the poems is entirely different, the latter being a sestina and the former arranged in three line stanzas, and even this stark difference in forms is an organic dialogue.

With three other volumes planned, there is a tremendous amount of work to go around, even for editors. Quinn says, "If you want an editorial position, you can have one. This is an open and urgent invitation." He can be contacted at either Frank.Quinn@pu-press.princeton.edu or limbicpoems@yahoo.com.