When Jacob reached out to me about starting what would become ballast, I was most taken with the idea that we would not try to fill a niche, but rather would have a commitment to contributing to the more of poetry. This commitment to more seems also to necessitate a commitment to being open, to a wide-ranging editorial scope. In The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser uses the phrase “the many-ness of the many,” which refers to the diversity of people and possibilities contained in community (Deleuze uses it, too). I think often of “manyness” when we read submissions. Our commitment to publishing poetry so that there is more poetry is genuine, and genuinely invigorating, but I have lately been contemplating the scale of my own openness as a reader, writer, and editor.  

The prevailing attitude at my MFA program was and is a rejection of the normative hierarchies of taste in contemporary poetries, a skepticism toward censoriousness of any kind, and an embrace of foreignness, messiness, decadence, and excess. The poetry my friends and I wrote there was full of sex and bodies and garbage and beauty. In fact, my and Jacob’s first collaborative project was a poetics reading group we called “Leaky Bodies,” a name which our university contested hotly, disallowing us from forming an official graduate club because of their suspicions that the name was somehow making fun of the Catholic culture (Jesus being the leaky body par excellence) or was obscene in some way they couldn’t discern. They were afraid they couldn’t read us right, that we were getting something past them that would be a corruption of their values. Also, they thought the name was bad and gross. I believe, but may be exaggerating, that an administrator once wrinkled her nose at me when she said it out-loud. It was an aesthetic and also moral judgment, and one that we were both frustrated and buoyed by. If we were bugging the establishment, we were doing something right. 

My own work was much more mainstream when I entered the MFA program: narrative, landscape-based poetry about aspects of my personal biography. The push toward the strange, the glitchy, the poetry-which-does-not-mean, that which the establishment might think was bad and gross was both fun and generative for my thinking and my writing. But there’s also a trickiness to trying to disrupt normative hierarchies, which is that your own aesthetic and moral judgements can, in some ways, become shaped by trying to invert the norm. The alt-hierarchy forms its own rules, its own boundaries, and a commitment to poetry in all its forms becomes obviously inaccurate when the poetries of the mainstream are roundly rejected. Can I have an appreciation for both, or must they be in opposition to one another? 

In her influential monograph Our Aesthetic Categories, Sianne Ngai emphasizes the finitude of aesthetic categories available to literary critics, and, presumably, to editors of small literary journals. While we very earnestly aspire for more & more & more poetry, we’re also not accepting every piece that comes through our inbox. We have our own aesthetic categories, aesthetic investments. But what are they? 

Here’s what I’ve noticed so far: 

• At ballast we share an editorial affection for poems which feature: bugs, landscapes, unknowing, portmanteaus, musical scores, dead things, wounds, flowers, ornamental flourishes, ecstatic visions, language that moves between high and low registers, waterways, erasures, citations, well executed dark jokes, and, in this issue, capital-L Love, which shows up at the end of two spectacular poems, as if issue 1.2 was happily haunted by George Herbert (we’ve recently accepted another poem, titled simply “Love,” slated for issue 1.3)

• While we love experimental, avant-garde, transgressive work, we’re not wholly committed to only publishing that which is transgressive; we also love a brief lyric, sometimes, and the wisdom of personal observation or experience

• We tend not to say yes to overtly didactic political poems, even when they remind me of folks I spent years studying, like Robinson Jeffers or the afore-mentioned Muriel Rukeyser
  

• We love formal play and formal commitment
  

• We want poems that demonstrate, in ways sometimes ineffable and sometimes concrete, that they are complete in themselves, that the poem understands itself to be finished and ready to speak into the world 

Does this get me any closer to an accounting of my aesthetic categories? 

Recently I lingered for a long time in a gallery in the Museum of Modern Art that houses part of the museum’s collection of “outsider” art. When I lived in Chicago, I loved to visit Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (at $5 for entry it is an absolute steal of a deal), with its two carefully curated galleries of works by self-taught and under-recognized artists, and its permanent installation of a room from Henry Darger’s apartment. 

There is almost always a sense of more in outsider and self-taught art, a playfulness, an earnestness, a combination of a practical, make-do sensibility and a ridiculous, excessive optimism that causes one to see the sculptural possibilities of cardboard and tinfoil and scraps of ribbon. I love that it is earnest, often maximalist, unselfconscious (?), iterative, often religiously inflected, improbable.

But are those aesthetic or moral categories? Am I after a sound or a feeling? 

At the MoMA, at Intuit, though, there’s still a sense of curation, of taste, of some hierarchy of selection. Do I reject it? Is it antithetical to openness? Much harder and more shameful to write about what I didn’t like, or wouldn’t have chosen. Once, I spent an afternoon in the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, and didn’t care for it at all. But why should it be so? Because it lacked an aesthetic quality that I had come to value, because it lacked a curatorial perspective that I agreed with?

At ballast we are decidedly not privileging rejection as a signifier of outsiderness, like, say, the sadly out-of-print The Rejected Quarterly, which only accepted a piece if it was accompanied by three rejection letters from other journals. That’s not to say this project and ones like it aren’t valuable; I think having radically inclusive spaces which eschew rejection are important and interesting endeavors. 

But the literary journal is, in its current and common iteration, the product of editorial selection. Submissions come in, some resonate, some don’t, we say yes, we say, no, thank you, our regrets. I am not interested in writing an essay about the difficulties of sending rejections (though it is difficult) or in defending my right to making editorial selections (I do feel justified), but in performing, in public, some self-reflection on the fact that my aesthetic categories are finite, they are circumscribed, they are as open as they can be, but even the horizon across an open field is only about 3 miles away, as far as the human eye can see. 

So, there’s some accounting to do, and continue to do, as we decide what is for ballast and what might not be. There’s transparency to aspire to and reflection to continue to engage in, there’s honesty and flexibility, and an earnest desire to treat with care each made thing that comes into our hands, whether we let it go or ask to keep it for a while and share it with you.

As you read this, our second issue, which is full of poems that I am delighted by and am so glad to share with you, I hope you might join me in the larger project of reacting, responding, accounting: do I like this, why do I like this, what do I like about this, where does that sense of attraction originate from, who gave it to me, what does it ask from me, what does it want to give me, what do I want to take. 

One of my favorite poets is James Schuyler, who everyone thinks is deeply ethical, and so do I, but I’m never sure how to say why he is so. What I can say is that I love his colors, his light, light through the water in the tulip vase, light as yellow as a jelly bean, the late morning light on a crust of toast left on a plate, the shock of an early spring flower in the yard. It always feels as though he gets everything into the poems: they’re long, they sprawl, they range, they don’t discriminate. But of course it’s an illusion, of course there’s a limit, the poet’s eye selecting the bits that work and fit and arranging them just so. 

—   Sara Judy, for ballast