Vallum – 2005

A press release from Vallum: contemporary magazine announces the magazine is “dedicated to exploring reality in all its warped and beautiful aspects” and that this issue is the journal’s first theme-based effort. The theme is “reality checks,” featuring “‘snapshots of things real and unreal.”

A press release from Vallum: contemporary magazine announces the magazine is “dedicated to exploring reality in all its warped and beautiful aspects” and that this issue is the journal’s first theme-based effort. The theme is “reality checks,” featuring “‘snapshots of things real and unreal.” As a “real” object in my hands, Vallum is glossy, slick, and “contemporary,” by which I mean sharply designed. And the Table of Contents is equally impressive: an interview with Paul Muldoon, translations of Baudelaire and Günter Kunert, an essay on Celan, and new poems by Stephen Dunn, Charles Bernstein, Sophie Cabot Black and nearly thirty others. There is work here that could well be classified as experimental both in form and language (Daniel Scott Tysdale’s “1 Epigraph + Five Postcards Addressed by an Admirer to Walter Benjamin Hanging on the Fridge + a Memo on a Napkin (Not Yet Sent)”), alongside work that is much quieter, almost painterly (Stephanie Bolster’s “Rattlesnake”). In his long interview with Joshua Auerbach, Paul Muldoon muses, “I suppose one of the great things about trying to write poems is that you can sort of hop about here and there, and imagine what it would have been like to do this or to have done that….” Vallum helps encourage us to hop, perhaps even to leap about. [Vallum Magazine, PO Box 48003, Montreal, Quebec, H2V4S8 Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $7. www.vallummag.com] – Sima Rabinowitz