Summer ’88—Ran into Milosz the other day at lunch. Upstairs at Chez Panisse. Recognized him from photographs: eyebrows less fierce in the flesh. Had published him in the first issue, buying directly from his publisher.

Introduced myself. He introduced his companion. Very glamorous. European. In a movie would have been a spy.

Mentioned I had been trying to get a manuscript from him, through the intercession of Bob Hass. (Would like to publish him, too.)

Milosz said he had been evaluating ZYZZYVA. (I am translating from his English; the lunch crowd was noisy; I was standing up; his words were quiet, leonine.)

There is much unevenness, he said.

Oh yes, I said, that is why we are eager for something from you.

He smiled. He was gracious. He spoke further words.

I thanked him. I went back to my guest. American. Very glamorous. In a movie, she would play a big advertiser.

Meanwhile, the unevenness goes on. No Milosz in this issue. No Hass, either. It is hard to live up to the great poets.

It’s not enough to say I’d like to publish Shakespeare. First of all, he’s not likely to be sending anything anytime soon. Second of all, if he does, it’s likely to be Titus. Which leaves you with a tough choice: do you just send it back with an apologetic note? And run the risk of not getting a shot at Hamlet. Or do you give him a call and say, I was hoping for one of those sonnets I saw in The Stratford Review, but, if you’d like, I’d be happy to work with you on....

Anyway, Shakespeares don’t come along every day, and you have to go with what’s out there. You have to be able to generate an issue from what’s available now, and that doesn’t mean in six months or a year, the term an anthology editor gets to work in.

You have to trust yourself that you will find enough good material to fill an issue, even though, needless to say, there is never enough. You have to be arrogant enough to pull the trigger when anything likely comes into view.

These days I seldom solicit. Almost everybody I’ve wanted to publish I already have—or at least tried to. So I tend to wait for work to be sent to me. I’m like a duck hunter. I get out to the blind early in the morning, when it’s cold and damp and lonely, and I wait. If a duck flies by, I shoot. Sometimes I miss. Sometimes I make a mistake and shoot down an albatross.

My hunting territory is the West Coast, which is a limitation, but there’s more than enough talent here to keep me happy. Of course, a lot of writers don’t want my recognition, they want recognition Back East, Where It Counts.

To survive, an editor has to establish a set of expectations, a level of excellence that writers can sense. In part, it’s the canon of writers published over the years. In part, it’s just the dimly perceived image of a mythical garden for which you serve as gatekeeper.

Litmags are primarily outlets, places for writers to publish; only secondarily are they pleasure palaces designed to entice and then satisfy readers. As outlets, they must seem to be interchangeable: some are a bit larger—but the difference between 5,000 readers and 500 is, in the larger scheme of things, negligible; some are better produced; some are even more conscientiously selected.... But forget the advice well-intentioned creative-writing teachers give about the need to “study the market”; it must be almost impossible to predict—even for veterans—which editor will take any given poem or story. It must seem like a crap shoot.

And I like to keep it that way. I don’t want to be predictable. I hate it when a writer says, I read the last issue and think my piece will fit perfectly. Maybe, but the last issue is long gone.

ZYZZYVA is mostly prose, although a balance between genres and schools and gender and...is important to me. I feel obligated to poetry, but it’s not my first passion; in any case, there are lots of dedicated poetry magazines, and not so many poetry readers who aren’t poets, so I feel I’m doing my fair share.

It’s very hard, for me at least, to generate essays. They almost never come in the slush pile, I suppose, because there is a real market for many kinds of essays. It’s also impossible to find humor, another commodity that’s valued in the marketplace. Recently, I decided to do an all-upbeat issue; I thought I could fill an issue with stuff that was funny and optimistic and full of cheer, but I couldn’t. It may be that writers are, perforce, a morbid bunch, that nobody would resort to the isolation of writing unless they were already lonely, already burdened by a message they couldn’t express within the confines of their normal lives.

Anyway, for an editor, it all comes down to two things: taste and judgment. Taste is what you like; judgment is about the politics of quality. I publish a lot of stuff based on judgment, not my personal taste. I take into consideration what I’ve done in the past and what the current issue still needs. I assume a journalist’s responsibility to cover the scene.

Political correctness has been a minor nuisance the past few years. I’m an integrationist. I’m interested in difference, but not in identity politics. I’m interested in what’s on the page, not in a writer’s background. As I told Amerasia Journal in 1994:

I have no more idea of what Asian American poetry is than I have of what Asian American prose might be. I assume it’s everything written by all those willing to call themselves Asian American. I don’t think it makes much difference, except to editors of anthologies of Asian American literature: they have to know whom to keep out.

My sense is that Asian American poetry still has a future in articulating cultural difference, but that its eventual assimilation into American poetry and then into poetry itself is inevitable.

Writing, I think, is one of the supreme ways to explore otherness. That’s what the imagination is all about. I think a man can write from a woman’s point of view, or at least try to, just as whites can write about blacks, and so on. The effort to imagine The Other is always perilous, but it can and should be done. I am opposed to every injunction that tries to limit what a writer can attempt to imagine.

Of course, I have some rules of my own, besides the geographical limitations, but they’re only negative ones, and only trivial at best. No poems inspired by paintings. No stories that begin with the narrator in a bar. Or waking up. Which eliminates Kafka, which is why it’s a trivial rule.
No stories about grandma’s funeral—that’s confronting death, which is good, but at too great a remove. It’s a good idea to write about grandma’s funeral, and a lot of other emotional events in one’s life—losing one’s virginity, for example—but I probably don’t want to publish these “exercises.”

I think it’s fun to offend the bourgeoisie and to say, I’m different and you’re stodgy and you don’t know and I’m more daring. But the real trick is to create beauty! To move the reader to tears or laughter. And that has nothing to do with shock. Or being smarter than thou.

I don’t keep a list of favorite writers, although if you asked me what I think about a particular writer, I could probably tell you. In general, I’m against the usual suspects, whoever they are.

The most perfect piece I’ve ever published, I think, was Brenda Hillman’s earthquake poem, “Might Forms.” My favorite story was Jon Billman’s firefighter story, “Ash,” his first time in print. And I loved being able to publish a kid who’d gone to the same prep school I did—an account of his stepfather’s murder.

I loved Blair Fuller’s memoir of his parents-as-artists; Larry Jordan’s tale of his encounter with Brendan Behan; F. X. Toole’s story of a boxing cut-man—Toole baked me a gooseberry pie as a thank-you for giving him his first-time-in-print at the age of 70; his first collection was published this summer by Ecco Press!

One of my favorites—the first to be listed in the First Time in Print section—was an account of the mental hospitals and halfway houses this one unfortunate kid had been in. I liked it because he refused to be beaten down, not by his illness, not by what his legitimate prospects were. He wanted to be a writer and he sent me his best effort and I published it. I suppose he reminded me of my brother, about whom more later.

I also liked discovering Jess Mowry. The first manuscript he sent in was written in pencil on a yellow legal pad. We started corresponding: I told him one of his stories about skateboard kids in the Oakland ghetto might be publishable if he used the word fuck a few less times. He bought an old manual typewriter...and went on to publish with Farrar, Straus....

My favorite covers are the ones designed specifically for us by China Adams, Jill Giegerich (who grew up in Chappaqua), Renée Petropolous, Rupert Garcia, Deborah Oropallo, Donald Farnsworth, Catherine Yi-yu Cho Woo, and Baochi Zhang.