SRPR (Spoon River Poetry Review)

Dear Friend,

I am writing to you in my capacity as Editor of SRPR (Spoon River Poetry Review) to ask for your financial help.  As the third-oldest continuously published poetry journal in the nation, SRPR has, in its nearly 50 years, encountered and grown through many inevitable bumps in the road. I’m so proud of this journal—of our integrity, of our indefatigable commitment to poetry and its historically vital role in human expression and community-making, and of the willingness of editors and staff before me to refuse the easy way out (quietly folding up shop) by rolling up their sleeves and meeting challenges head-on with a combination of grace and grit.

As SRPR’s fourth editor, I want to honor this history and ensure our future, and like my predecessors, that entails recognizing when we need help and asking for it. If you already know you’d like to help, you can do so quickly and easily right now by donating to our GoFundMe campaign.

If you’re thinking about it, but would like more information, I understand…

Right now, SRPR is facing a major financial deficit because of unprecedented budget cuts to the arts at both state and national levels: in the past ten years, SRPR’s funding has been slashed by $8500—that’s a cut of 98%, and accounts for close to all of our operating budget. These cuts have been slow but steady, and we’ve survived them by applying for private grants, developing a first-rate and distinctive annual contest for poets , and creating more value for our readers and contributors with the addition of new features (such as in-depth interviews with feature poets , and substantial review essays of new books of poetry  by established poet-critics). For years, I’ve also sought to expand SRPR’s reach by teaching poetry in local elementary schools. But in the past year, as these cuts are felt—most locally and acutely—now at the university level, SRPR has been unable to outrun them.

Hence, our decision to create a GoFundMe campaign and ask for your direct support to see us through this difficult stretch. 

As lovers of the arts, you’ve witnessed lean times with regard to patronage before, and you know that things will, in time, shift back around. But what’s easy to lose sight of is the fact that such shifts are not inevitable; rather, they’re always the result of people coming together in the face of adversity, articulating their shared values, and taking concrete action to support and enact these values, even and especially when doing so isn’t easy. Such triumphs of co-creation illustrate what I love most about humans: our astonishing capacity for communication, creativity, caring, and community-making.

So, while these cuts are surely cause for concern, I also choose to view them as a call to collective action—to grassroots, cooperative action, the only kind that has ever triumphed over policy decisions whose trickle-down effect is, intentionally or not, the disenfranchisement of certain entities and sometimes peoples.

Right now, our staff is busy writing up new grant proposals, doing all we can to secure alternative, relatively sustainable funding for the future. However, even if we are awarded this money, we won’t see it for 9 – 12 months. In the meantime, we have a forthcoming issue to pay for, and a summer 2020 issue to produce after that.

In order to continue publication of SRPR during 2020, we need to raise $7500 through our GoFundMe campaign.

Can we count on your help? Your donation is tax-deductible, and will be used entirely to cover operational costs such as printing and mailing, and payments to artists, review essayists, and copyeditors. As is the case with the majority of literary magazines, SRPR is staffed and stewarded almost entirely by volunteers. 

But perhaps you need a bit more information about what we do, and why we matter, before you choose to donate your money. In that case…

SRPR is a 128-page international literary journal devoted exclusively to poetry and poetry reviews. We publish two issues a year, and are devoted to publishing highest quality work from a wide range of aesthetic sensibilities from poets all over the nation and the world, in English as well as in translation. We pride ourselves on inclusivity and innovation, and are also selective, publishing about 3% of the work that is submitted to us.

SRPR was titled after the river in central Illinois that was itself purportedly named for the freshwater mussel shells used by the region’s Native American peoples and early colonists as eating utensils—as spoons. Today, SRPR’s current investment in place is best understood as an interest in emplacement; that is, of the many ways we are situated in and through language, the earth, and each other; in and through our histories and our blind spots.

To this end, SRPR takes seriously the literary magazine’s historical role as a site for community building—not the creation of a clique or a club, but of a capacious, diverse, and committed community wherein readers and contributors feel at once safe and surprised, and around which community is built and nurtured.

A prime example of our commitment to community-building is the Annual Lucia Getsi Poetry Gala  that we host every April at the Ewing Manor  in Bloomington, Illinois. Over the course of ten years, this event has become the most beloved of its kind in central Illinois: every year we host three phenomenal poets from different parts of the country, and we solicit major donations of food and wine from local businesses such as Stave Wine Bar , Epiphany Farms Hospitality Group , and Nightshop Restaurant . The event is unique in that it is hosted off-campus in an elegant, historical setting; offers abundant wine and beautiful food; and is FREE and open to the public. Every year this special event draws a diverse and dynamic crowd of all ages, and in recent years has become standing-room only. Our poets tell us time and again that they’ve never been treated better or been welcomed by such an engaged audience.

At SRPR, we care deeply about connection, and believe that the arts play a crucial role in cultivating an ethos of care in our world. One potential solution to our financial challenge right now is to abandon print, and become available only online. Many literary journals have, in fact, chosen this course as a solution to the funding cuts we all face. But to me, there is something nearly sacred, and certainly very special, about the sensual experience of reading a poem on an actual printed page. Poetry originated as a bardic art—that is, as an oral form, often sung out loud (a tradition that is being revived by the powerful genre of spoken-word poetry). Over time, poetry migrated to the page, a form that could be copied and easily shared with a wider audience, but that risked occluding the vital aural component so key to its pleasure and power.

The poet in me withers when I think of shearing off even more of poetry’s sensual appeal in an effort to keep the genre alive and circulating. I would far rather ask for your help than opt to sacrifice the visual, tactile experience of a printed journal, something I can flip through, write in, dog-ear, drop in and rescue from the bath, and place on my coffee table and kids’ dressers so that others might be moved by poetry, too.

I so hope that you will donate to SRPR. We’ve made it quick and easy to do so: just donate here to our GoFundMe campaign. And please feel free to share this link with others whom you think will help!

Finally, in closing, I’d like to say that SRPR holds a very special place in my heart because it’s where my first poem was published, back in 2003 (long before I became editor!). As poets, this is how we make our debut into the world of poetry, how we gain professional traction and visibility; it is impossible to publish a book of poems without first having published a good many of them in literary journals. I have SRPR to thank, then, for facilitating my work in the world not only as an editor, but as a poet.

As an offer of thanks, both to the journal I love and to you for supporting it, I would like to leave you with this very first published poem of mine, called “Caterpillar,” a poem I wrote on a blustery December day much like this one, nearly 17 years ago.

Thank you so much for your kind and generous support.

Love,

Kirstin

 
CATERPILLAR


I found her in the cellar on my birthday,

the day of Epiphany, gummy underside contracted

 
like scar tissue, puckered and thin.

I was amazed by her persistence—

 
one millimeter, pause, and then another—

though I could see, or so I thought,

 
that she would never cross the distance.

She stopped moving altogether as I maneuvered

 
her into a box, careful not to touch the too-soft body.

For days she lay curled like a cut-off pinkie,

 
the spinach that I left for her untouched.

Still, I changed her water every day, a plastic bottle-cap

 
turned upside down, its edges round

enough so that she wouldn’t pierce her belly

 
when she drank. I wondered where she’d come from—

how she’d survived not only harvest

 
time but the thick drifts of snow and ice

that still this treeless land—

 
and then, on the fourth day, she came to life

again. Though the spinach still remained

 
intact, she had traveled from the corner up the wall

of her small box, leaving a trail

 
of excrement, a single strand of corn silk.

This time, I lined her box with a variety of greens

 
(romaine, red-leaf, chicory), but all she wanted

was a place to weave her pale cocoon.

 
Soon, only the faintest trace of her

familiar shape was left. At first, I thought my timing

 
had been perfect—shiny head wrenched free,

wide black face, all eyes, strained to one side—

 
I waited for the rest of her to follow.

Nothing I knew about the pain of self-revision

 
had prepared me for the tending

of such loss: parting

 
the brittle chrysalis, lifting her

crippled wings turning to dust.

 

(from the Spoon River Poetry Review, 28:1, Winter 2003, pp 47 – 48)