Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

Interviews
Interview with Ami Kaye of Pirene’s Fountain
March 2009
Ami Kaye: Mr. Side, it is a pleasure to have you with us for this interview. We are especially interested in hearing
some insights from the “other side of the fence!” Please tell us about your work as a poet and as an editor.
Jeffrey Side: Thanks for inviting me. I’m honoured you asked.
I like to write poetry that’s heavily connotative, so that readers can make their own minds up about what a
particular image or phrase means. I don’t like poetry that tells you everything, or spells things out for you. I think
this is because I came to poetry from having a love of song. Song is largely connotative.
Because I didn’t read any poetry at the time, I was quite naïve about it, and assumed that it would be as connotative
as song was. It was quite a disappointment to find out that this wasn’t the case. But in my naiveté, I didn’t realise that
the sort of poetry I was reading wasn’t really representative of poetry in general. It was only when I discovered older
poetry, the sort written by William Blake or Thomas Wyatt, that I saw that poetry could be as good as song. This is
because the older the poem, the closer it is to the song or ballad tradition. As you know, song predates poetry-or
rather songs became poems once they were written down and read privately. After examining the older poetry, I saw
that it was its tendency to generalise and avoid descriptive elements that made it “song-like”. Poetry up until around
the time of William Wordsworth tended to generalise, after Wordsworth (and largely because of his influence)
poetry became more novelistic and descriptive.
The editing came about only because I wanted to promote the sort of poetry that used generalisation (which made it
closest to the song tradition) and which was being ignored by mainstream poetry because of this. So I started The
Argotist Online, to act as a platform for such poetry. The name for the site was taken from a journal I deputy edited
from 1996-2000: The Argotist. This had national sales in the UK, being sold through Blackwell’s bookshop chain. It
had poetry in it but it was mainly an arts review with articles and interviews on a range of art topics. Our big coup
was getting an interview with Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky. I also edited an issue of an undergraduate journal
called Off-the-Cuff while I was at Liverpool University.
Ami Kaye: What qualifications do you think are necessary to become a literary editor? What type of decisions and
responsibilities does an editor face?
Jeffrey Side: I think the main qualification you have to have is enthusiasm based on a reason why you’re doing it. In
my case, the reason for The Argotist Online was to promote a certain sort of poetry I felt was being underrepresented.
Other editors will have other reasons. But you have to have a motivation; otherwise you’ll lose interest.
Regarding what types of decisions and responsibilities you face, I suppose that depends on the nature of the journal
or on-line journal. Because The Argotist Online is aimed at people who are mainly sympathetic to non-mainstream
poetics, I tend to choose articles, interviewees and poetry that would interest them. But I’m also aware that people
can’t be pigeonholed and so there’s a lot of content on the site that would appeal to a broader audience, such as the
series of songwriting interviews with singer/songwriters.
The main responsibility outside of deciding what to publish is making sure that once you decide what to publish it
gets published. I don’t like to let people down, so if I ask them for an article or to be interviewed I make sure that it
goes ahead and appears on the site.
Ami Kaye: What is the difference between a print and online journal, if any, in your opinion?
Jeffrey Side: The most noticeable difference is that with an on-line journal you don’t have to do a print run, find a
distribution network, find retail outlets and find the funding for all of this. All you have to do (in my case at least) is
find a web host and make sure you exchange links with lots of similar sites.
Also, an on-line journal is always “present” and accessible in a way a print journal isn’t. By that I mean that surfers
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