T HE C ENACLE / A PRIL - The ElectroLounge

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poetry workshop at Emerson College. Many of my poems in this issue were
discussed in this same class. My “Soulard’s Notebooks” prose responds at length to
the timidity & distasteful conventionality I was being hit with in Emerson’s MFA
program.
Somewhat satisfying, & certainly new for The Cenacle, was the appearance
of R.S. Steinberg’s fiction “Particles.” Steinberg was a fellow MFA student & the
first contributor not of my longtime circle to publish in the magazine. His odd story
has the following genesis:
The idea for “Particles” came from a gallery talk I heard about
Gerhard Richter, the German painter, who starts some of his work
with a real image, like a snapshot, and then repaints it in stages by
technically changing edges, textures, and so forth, until the result is
quite different from what he started with. He calls himself an antiabstractionist:
the ‘anti’ means that the principle of abstraction is not
some conscious aesthetic idea of his, but the automatic working of the
technical transformations.
To make fiction that way I started with three banal images. I
let the random number generator in my computer choose the
sequence in which I would attend to each of them, and then allowed
lugubrious imagination to generate detail.
It was a satisfying experience overall to edit & publish
Steinberg’s work; & to debut the issue at the 11/22/97
Jellicle Guild meeting at Jacob Wirth’s Restaurant in Boston
with him & other two other Emerson students in
attendance.
One other feature began in Cenacle 22. “Notes on
Contributors” contrived in part to give Steinberg’s
explanation of his story a suitable place in the magazine &
partly to fool with yet another piece of conventional
periodical apparatus to see how well it worked in The
Cenacle; it worked better the second time around, in
Cenacle 23 December 1997, when I made the feature my
own, telling the truth rather than simply the facts about my
friends.
Cenacle 23, December 1997, the 18th issue in 32 months, was debuted at
the 9th anniversary & 72nd meeting of the Jellicle Literary Guild. I was very
pleased at how the year had gone & that I’d beaten the clock to get this issue out
on time, a feat I hadn’t accomplished in over two years!
At 88 pages the issue was the longest one yet & contains many pieces of
which I’m still proud. The table of contents’ claim of six issues a year is fulfilled, all
the pieces have headers & nifty stylized font page numbers. My opening “Notes
The Cenacle / 48 / April 2003