AGNI at Twenty-Five

When Valerie Duff, our managing editor, was one year old, AGNI had just reincarnated as a literary magazine: twenty-five years later, the vectors converged. In that quarter of a century, several waves of writers have broken into print through AGNI’s pages, among them some who are widely acknowledged as the best of their generation (you know who you are). We make too much of numbers and age, but there are milestones worth recognizing and the twenty-five-year mark seems by consensus one of them. We celebrate it with this special issue, for which older writers, friends of the magazine from various stages in its history, chose work by new writers who’d never appeared in a national publication. This is how the editorial chain of being at its best has always worked—as J. Laughlin, dean of American editors, will certainly testify. But the exchange of energies and intelligence needs to be reciprocal. Young writers who fail to discover their literary ancestry are not likely to develop past the first spurt. What an artist desires, as Derek Walcott puts it, is continuance; and the exchange must move in both directions at once.

Two features in particular should be noted. The first is the conversation between Saul Bellow and critic Sven Birkerts. One would only have wished it longer: here is a convergence prepared for by years of fertile reflection and boisterous admiration—Mr. Bellow can’t possibly know the hours this writer spent some decades ago with the young Birkerts discussing Charlie Citrine’s notions about that huge operation, America: Humboldt’s Gift appeared around the time AGNI moved to Boston and the literary adventure began in earnest.

The other is the interview with Charles Rowell, remarkable editor of the important journal Callaloo, conducted by the poet Thomas Sayers Ellis. It is the second in our ongoing series of interview with editors, whose role as middleman between the writer and the market is often poorly understood. The position, like everything else in publishing, is changing. According to the hype, the book business remains nearly as bullish as Wall Street, but there’s no denying that literature, as Don DeLillo recently said of the novel, “may seem to be wearing an expiration date that takes effect tomorrow.” Consider, for instance, the state of reviewing: once estimable vehicles such as the Post’s Book World are so confused about their identity, they devote fully a quarter of their pages to commentary on celebrity bios and books about other media. In such a climate, it seems to us vital that writers and younger editors know that they are part of a tradition well worth preserving.

One reason the magazine has thrived over the last decade is thanks to the support of Boston University, whose administration and staff have provided practical help in so many areas, from maintaining office space to mailing out issues, to providing major assistance in grantsmanship. Their efficiency and collegiality deserve our abiding gratitude.

Dozens of extraordinary young people have passed through our offices as interns and managing editors and readers—their presence, as well as their contribution, reminds us that belles lettres in America in the last years of the century remain a going concern: to them, again, our thanks.

Several arts organizations—the Lannan Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and especially the National Endowment for the Arts—have kept us alive in lean days. The NEA has done an enormous amount to help even the playing field financially—without it, the production and distribution of literature would be far more narrowly pursued.

The pursuit of literature requires passion, and a kind of commitment that borders on the religious. Solitary in its practice, its ultimate meaning is, however, communal. Every vigorous page of prose and each poem that’s spiked with life intensifies and enlarges us. Finally, then, I’d like to dedicate this anniversary issue to my colleagues, in the University—in the English and Creative Writing Departments and at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre—and in the wider community, whose exemplary devotion to the literary arts, whose passion, has been not so much a support as a spur, a steady incitement to growth.

—15 September 1997