HILL & QUAD |
Leaping from One Path of Thought to Another: Seneca Review at 50
50
CRENNER
18 / HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGES
by Andrew Wickenden ’09
F
ounded in Emeritus of English James 1970, Hobart and Crenner who, with former HWS William Smith Colleges’ English Professor Ira Sadoff, professional literary was a founding editor of Seneca magazine has a long Review. But in publishing history of innovation “exciting new poetry that was and experimentation, being strongly influenced by publishing important the likes of Gary Snyder, Robert voices, pushing formal Bly and John O’Hara, who were boundaries and helping make American poetry reimagining the way more than a dusty pursuit of readers experience academics,” Crenner says the literary art for nearly 100 magazine was a vehicle to help issues. Seneca Review get “American poetry out of the is one of many journals classroom and into the fray.” that sprouted up in Seneca Review might Seneca Review first issue, 1970 the late ’60s and early never have been if not for two ’70s — and one of just a handful from that era students at the time: Joel Rose ’70, a novelist, that are still in circulation. From its first issue, screenwriter and former editor at DC Comics, the magazine has been publishing some of the and the late Josephine “Josie” Woll ’70, who most influential and idiosyncratic writers of was an author, editor and professor of Russian the past 50 years. Numbering among its many at Howard University. They had approached contributors are poet laureates and recipients Crenner and Sadoff not only with the proposal of just about every prestigious national and for the magazine but with a means to fund it international literary prize, including the through HWS student governments. Pulitzer and Nobel. The 50th anniversary issue, As the first issue came together, Rose guest-edited by poet Joe Wenderoth, will be and Woll independently edited a selection of published in the spring of 2020. writing by HWS students that, to their dismay, was relegated to a separate section of the magazine, rather than integrated with the work Early Days of established poets and writers; however, the While the magazine’s early issues included time spent in the Seneca Review office “was the fiction and criticism, the editors’ poetic best of my education,” Rose says. sensibilities made Seneca Review a vital venue “I remember spending hours and hours for the surge of writers producing poems reading manuscripts and putting the magazine in reaction to the scholastic formalism that together,” he says. “Josie had a very sharp point gripped American poetry after World War II and of view and we had a good back and forth about throughout the 1950s. In the early years, “we our own tastes in literature and what we were had no special editorial slant,” says Professor trying to do with Seneca Review. I’m not sure we
