We asked Jeffrey Levine, founder and Editor in Chief of Tupelo Press, to share some musings about publishing writ large, and Tupelo work he’s particularly excited about – here’s what he shared this time around:
A Profile of Tupelo Press (New York Times, December 2013)
Why Publish Poetry?
Poetry is language that is most alive, most intense, and most fully expressive of the musical, dramatic, imagistic and emotional potential of words — words in shapes. Poetry requires concentration and even courage to read, or write, or publish — and in this time, when we’re all (to quote T. S. Eliot) “distracted by distraction from distraction,” poetry invites and allows the deepest forms of concentration.
And a fun piece from his blog:
Last spring I was interviewed, rather informally by a 14-year-old boy, one I happen to know quite well, whose school project was to recreate a Studs Terkel “Working” sort of oral history, and who rather inexplicably chose me as his subject. I saved that transcript for later, and here, as I enter my 15th year at the helm of Tupelo Press (“Where wilt thou lead me?”) it so happens that “later” is now. I thought it might be fun to start off a new year (that would be the year 5774 by the Old Calendar) of blogging with this bit of oral history.