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Vallance Review 56, April 2006 A Fond Farewell to Sara Russell as Founding Editor of "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments." William Shakespeare (1564-1615) Sonnet 116
Up, up and away we go, into the wild blue yonder!
Sara and Miggy kitty (1998) I first had the distinct pleasure of "meeting" Sara Russell online in the winter of 2001, when she joined our Yahoo sonnet group, Sonnet: Describe Adonis. From that day on, our relationship has been truly warm and highly productive. I believe I can honestly say with a heartfelt sense of pride that Sara and I have worked together famously as a team on Poetry Life & Times for the past 5 years. Sara has been the Editor-in-Chief since January 1998, when she founded her now internationally renowned poetry E-Zine. I myself have been the in house poetry critic with Poetry Life & Times since September 2001. One day, on the way to the Forum, it so happened that Sara posted many of her delightful sonnets on our sonnet group, and that was how she and I hit it off. Taking a cue from our warming professional relationship as poets, I finally took the plunge and asked Sara whether she would be interested in interviewing my poet friend and cohort, C.S. Snow and myself in Poetry Life & Times, and she graciously agreed. We were co-interviewed in the June 2001 issue of Poetry Life & Times. This interview in turn gave me the bright idea that perhaps I might write a critical poetry review or two for Poetry Life & Times, and once again, Sara readily assented. So starting with Vallance Review 1, September 2001, in which I reviewed a sonnet by the English Victorian sonneteer, Mathilde Blind, I began penning a monthly poetry critical column Sara was to euphemistically call none other than, "The Vallance Review". Since September 2001, I have written 54 Vallance Reviews, while Sara Russell has written one guest review, namely; Describe Adonis by Richard Vallance (2003) inspired by William Shakespeare's Sonnet 53, while our most illustrious cohort, the funny Potato of Terror, has penned yet another, to wit, Potatoes, Sonnets and the Enormous Muse (September 2003), and it is witty! The Potato of Terror's spudnacious spin on The Vallance Review is so uproariously funny that you simply HAVE to read it again, if only to vicariously tickle Sara's, POT's and my fancy. However, this little review is neither about The Potato of Terror nor is it about me. It's all about Sara Russell, whom we honour and acknowledge for her long 9 years of unflagging devotion as the Editor of Poetry Life & Times from January 1998 until the present. As of this issue, both Sara Russell and I are retiring full time from Poetry Life & Times. Robin Ouzman Hislop, a highly talented UK poet and publisher with the soundest of international reputations, is assuming full editorialship of Poetry Life & Times. Sara and I wish Robin the greatest good fortune in assuming the captaincy of Poetry Life & Times as of spring 2006. Given his considerable editorial and publishing talents, I have no doubt that Robin will bring fresh insights and many new well established international poets to Poetry Life & Times. Well now, let's focus our full attention on Sara Russell, on her brilliant achievements as the publisher of one of the world's finest international contemporary poetry E-Zines and as a publisher in her own right and as one of Britain's most gifted contemporary poets. Now the best way to introduce a poet of such great talent as Sara is to let her simply delight us all with a sample of her poetry. The poem which I have chosen for this, my final Vallance Review in Poetry Life & Times, is one which particularly appeals to me as Poetry Life & Times' regular poetry critic and as a regular contributor of poetry to the journal. The poem is none other than:
Andante he plays, with a bittersweet air, "Mareschal, Mareschal, lay down your bow, Monsieur Mareschal smiles; continues his tune "Mareschal, Mareschal, lay down your bow, As his notes start to falter, his heart speeds to race, "Mareschal!" over and over, she cries, © by Sara Russell 2006 
Franz Liszt (1847) by Miklós Barabás (1810-1898) This remarkable poem plays on my poetic sensibilities at several levels. First and foremost, it is a beautifully rhythmic, highly expressive formal Neo-Romantic poem. Now anyone who knows Sara Russell and who knows me is fully cognizant of the fact the both Sara and I are true connoisseurs of the role the multi-faceted early Third Millennium Neo-Romanticism plays in the composition of poetry nowadays. Secondly, this poem deals with music, and nothing in this world appeals to me more in poetry than does music. I would even go so far as to assert that for me (and I suspect, to a great extent, for Sara as well), la poésie, c'est la musique = poetry is music. Anyone who has read more than a few Vallance Reviews over the past 5 years must surely realize this. I have only to cite just a few of these reviews to highlight the intimate connectivity between music and poetry, for instance: 1. Vallance Review 16, December 2002, "When is a sonnet a song? [part 2] Once again, in the early Third Millennium, after seven long centuries in which poets have doggedly insisted on merely writing their poetry and sometimes reciting it verbally, the golden opportunity again presents itself for poets, artists and musicians to merge and meld their various artistic media into one single medium. I do not jest. I confidently predict that long before the end of this century the presently separate Arts as we now know them will coalesce and merge, not the least because of the all pervasive influence of the Internet and other emerging international, multi-lingual, multi-arts technologies now sweeping the globe. The signs of the merging of the Arts are already everywhere. One telling example of the multi-mediafying of poetry is found right here in Ottawa, where OC Transpo, Canada's capital city's transportation system, every year proudly displays Transpoetry, winning poems posted prominently on our LRT and bus system. If that isn't multi-media poetry, I don't know what is. Yes, if this isn't poetry reaching the Marxian "masses" or the populace at large, pray tell, what is? It is manifestly obvious to me that Sara Russell has played a major role in the advancement of multi-faceted arts in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and not just of poetry per se, as a simple subset of literature, a discreet form of art. Literature, photography, painting, cinematography and music, not to speak of heavens knows what other emergent forms of art, static and cinematic, not to mention 3 dimensional, shall inevitably merge as our century progresses. Of this I have not a shadow of the slightest doubt. Sara Russell's sensuous and sweepingly haunting poem, "Maestro" beautifully typifies the nervous, highly adventurous spirit of our Age. It is an expression par excellence of the ground-swelling impetus sweeping literature and all other related art forms in our amazing century, a revolution that is to have a permanent effect on more and more vivid human expression in all the major Arts media as the decades progress. Where all this will lead is anyone's guess. But the future surely holds exciting promises in store for us. This is precisely why I am convinced we are living in a Neo-Romantic Era, the second following: 1. the great Romantic Eric (ca. 1770-1835) and 2. the first brief Neo-Romantic Period of the early twentieth century when impassioned poets the likes of Alan Seeger, Rupert Brooke and Edna Saint Vincent Millay flourished, all of whom I have reviewed in previous Vallance Reviews [1]. If this is not enough to convince our readers that something big indeed is afoot in the first decade of the Third Millennium, then I cordially invite you to revisit Vallance Review 11, July 2001, in which I first introduced my theories respecting the poetic revolution now sweeping the planet, a revolution both Sara Russell and I, along with so many other poets all over the world, have been embracing with gusto and in droves. This highly novel revolution in the expressive arts, poetry, music, photography and music (amongst others), all of which are merging in so many exciting new ways in our century, is also in its own peculiar way a kind of second Renaissance, minor or major, who can really tell? In Italy during the first Renaissance, from about 1480 onwards, the positively revolutionary invention of printing swept the then known world, which coincidentally, expanded in just a few decades from the confines of Europe to encompass the entire globe as the result of the circumnavigating voyages of our intrepid forbears, the great explorers of the early sixteenth century. During that incredibly exciting era, which also witnessed the birth of the modern world as we now know it, the most astonishing success story was "... the printed book. Like human thoughts, like an angel in fact, one book can be in many different places at the same time. (italics mine) [2]" It was nothing less than fortuitous that I happened to stumble on this astonishing quotation in a history of the Italian Renaissance just the other day. Now the implications of a statement such as this are indeed much more far reaching in the early Third Millennium than they were even at the height of the Italian Renaissance, when the printed book flourished in such great cultural centres as Florence and Venice. Today, on the threshold of the Third Millennium, we are witnessing a cultural and socio-economic explosion in technology and the arts no less decisive than the invention of printing in the Renaissance. If anything, it is far more explosive and far-reaching in its implications and consequences on all of human society everywhere around the entire world. The rapid expansion of the Internet, of multi-media broad-band technologies, of satellite TV and video cellular phones, and a proliferation of other amazing new technologies previously unheard of even as early as 1990 are certain to transform the present revolution in trans-global human communication into a far more profound metamorphosis of human society than even the Renaissance could have dared to dream of. If the printed book was so like an Angel by being simultaneously in so many places at once, how much more so like an Angel is the Internet and the current wireless technology revolution now sweeping the planet? We have only the faintest notion of where all this is bound to lead us — except that the exciting new vistas now opening up metaphorically before our very eyes are so multifarious that, like Percy Bysshe Shelley before us in his Defence of Poetry (1821), we can indeed prognosticate: §29 For he [the poet] not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the forms of the flower and the fruit of latest time. §30 Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. §31 A Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions of time and place and number are not. (italics mine) [3] Well, if that prophecy were true in 1821 (and trust me, it was), it is all the more so in the current worldwide revolution sweeping our little global village in all the Arts, bar none. We are living in a truly exciting historical Era, and Sara Russell, whether she has been consciously aware of it or not — though I strongly suspect she has been — has done so much to contribute to the cultural and artistic revolution now sweeping the planet. How so? Read on, dear reader, read on. Well, as you Brits would say, the proof is in the pudding. We have only to revisit a number of back issues of Poetry Life & Times for it to fully dawn on us that with Sara Russell at its helm, we have been witnessing a major international poetry E-Zine flower into a new wave phenomenon brilliantly embodying the fundamental principles of early Third Millennium Neo-Romanticism we have just enumerated. First and foremost, where Sara Russell really excels as a poetry journal editor is in her uncanny journalistic ability to round up and interview famous poets, artists and musicians who so marvellously exemplify the spirit of our Age. I have not yet encountered any other contemporary poetry journal or E-Zine editor anywhere else who has perfected the skills of interviewing poets so well as has Sara Russell. She stands out head and shoulders above the crowd. And here again, the interview is par excellence yet another modern multi-media medium so eminently suited to the advancement of the coalescing Arts as we are coming to understand them in the early Third Millennium. To this end, allow me to draw your undivided attention to just a few of the more enlightened interviews Sara has conducted over the past 9 years in Poetry Life & Times. It is no easy task for me to highlight even these few reviews, because frankly speaking, so many of her interviews have been nothing short of brilliant, and some illustrate a clarity of insight on Sara's part into the sweeping trends now washing through poetry in all languages around our little world, let alone English. The very fact that Sara, an English poetry editor and poet, should have had the foresight to interview so many non-English poets is remarkably telling in itself. England is often enough considered to be an insular society, and has generally been so historically. But leave it to Sara Russell to buck that trend. As a Canadian poet, editor and publisher, living as I do in a continental officially bilingual nation where multiculturalism is highly encouraged and promoted even in the face of the vast monolithic English language culture of America, I must admit that I have always been taken slightly aback by Sara's uncanny ability to relate to multiculturalism and to world poetry at all socio-cultural levels. That is no mean feat coming from a poet living in a unilingual nation such as England. So it's hats off from me to Sara Russell! But on to our reviews. Again, I wish to stress, these stellar interviews are merely representative of the high professional quality of all of Sara's interviews I have had the distinct pleasure of reading in Poetry Life & Times. The interviews I have chosen to celebrate are those which appeal to me most personally. You probably have other favourites. Ainsi soit-il. To each his or her own. 1. The first interview I'd like to mention dates way back to January 1999, when Poetry Life & Times was just leaving its infancy.  In this particular interview, An Interview with Lyn Lyfshin, Sara celebrated the truly remarkable achievements of a very well known international feminist writer, the American Lyn Lifshin, who had already written (can you imagine?) over 100 books by that time and published 4 anthologies of women writers. Quite a publishing coup, if ever I have heard one. To put it in a nutshell, I found this interview to be most compelling and colourful. To use a well-coined Wordsworthian concept, this friendly interview shows true "intimations" of greater things to come in Poetry Life & Times, as we shall presently see.  2. The next interview which grabbed my attention was Sara's encounter with the native Amerindian poet, Dancing Bear, in An Interview with J.P. Dancing Bear, January 2002. It is scarcely accidental that I should have been attracted to this interview, since I myself have always shown a keen interest in Amerindian aboriginal literature, as has my cohort and close friend, the American poet, C.S. Snow, co-interviewed with myself in an earlier issue of Sara's E-Zine (June 2001). But what really astounds me is that a British poetry publisher and editor such as Sara Russell would take such a keen interest in North American Amerindian literature and poetry. Yet not only has she done so here, but on several other occasions in Poetry Life & Times, as we shall presently see. The very fact that Sara Russell should have consciously and deliberately chosen to interview Native North American poets, writers and publishers on not one, but several occasions in Poetry Life & Times really impresses me. Once again, Sara is showing her colours as a truly international publisher fully aware of the multicultural trends in poetry circles from all around the world. More tellingly, not only does she celebrate international multiculturalism in her interviews with Amerindian poets but with poets from so many other diverse socio-cultural and national backgrounds.
 To mention just a few of these in passing, we also have Sara's interview with the illustrious Jewish poet, Elisha Porat (January 2000), with Munayem Mayenin of Bangladesh (April 2004) and with the bilingual, bicultural Acadian poet, Richard Doiron (July 2004).  3. Another interview which I am thrilled to highlight is An Interview with Üzeyir Lokman Çayci (September 2002), if only because in this instance, Sara has taken the plunge and interviewed, not an English speaking, but a French speaking poet who knows no English at all. In the same issue of Poetry Life & Times, as well as in a later one that same year, Sara Russell enlisted my own talents as a bilingual English-French Canadian poet to act as a mediating translator between Üzeyir Lokman Çayci and herself, since neither of these writers could directly speak to the other. The experiment was a smashing success. Even more amazing is the fact that Üzeyir Lokman Çayci is a bilingual French-Turkish poet whose high flying reputation is firmly established in France, Turkey, all over Europe, and even in the USA. He has been published hundreds of times on the World Wide Web, and he is a multi-media poet and artist in every sense of the word. His poems on the Internet are almost always illustrated with his spiritually challenging original art work. Üzeyir Lokman Çayci has also found over twenty of his socially trenchant poems published in French, Turkish and in English translation by Richard Vallance in The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry = Le Florilège de la nouvelle Pléiade (2005) ISBN 0-9737888-6-0, which is yet another CD-ROM multimedia poetry anthology featuring poetry by 33 poets from all over the world, accompanied by not only hundreds of original photos and artwork, but by scores of high quality musical selections as well. And so the multi-media Arts revolution of the twenty-first century proceeds valiantly afoot. Here, once again, Sara Russell has proven herself to be a truly international poetry E-zine editor and publisher at every level, literarily, artistically, culturally, socially and politically, in so far as she has always been gifted with the uncanny ability to utterly overcome and transcend what many folks would consider well nigh insurmountable barriers to human communication, above all linguistic barriers. And what could be more 21st. century communication than this? Nothing, to my mind at least. It is a sad fact of life that all too many American publishers, editors and writers, including poets, are truly purblind in so far as they only see English as the language of literature and poetry, whereas nothing could be further from the truth or from the socio-cultural and political realities of twenty first century world literature. If anything, the multicultural phenomenon of literature, including poetry notwithstanding, in languages other than English, and often in several languages simultaneously by one and the same poet, is sweeping the globe more so now than in any previous historical era. So don't you think it's perhaps high time we had better get used to it?  4. In a repeat performance of her highly insightful and enlightened interview with Dancing Bear we have cited earlier in no. 2., Sara Russell interviews another highly reputed Amerindian, only this time a woman poet, namely Sondra Ball (October 2002), a mere one month after her interview with Üzeyir Lokman Çayci. Sara's connections with poets from around the world abound in droves, as if the interviews I have already highlighted don't make this glaringly obvious. In so many amazing ways, Sondra Ball is Sara's American Gemini counterpart, for her own international, multilingual E-Zine, Autumn Leaves (ISSN 1547-156X) attracts at least 20,000 online visitors per MONTH on the Internet. Note also that Sondra Ball so atypically bucks the trend in the United States for poetry editors to publish poetry only in English. Is Sondra Ball another new wave multi-media publisher and editor? You bet your bottom dollars. If her poetry journal, Autumn Leaves isn't a twenty-first multimedia poetry clearinghouse of the first order, I don't know what is. And once again, Sara Russell has shown herself to be truly perspicacious in realizing that in the person of Sondra Ball she has met her editorial match.  5. I would be greatly remiss were I not to give an honourable mention to none other than Elaine Davis, Editor of Kedco Studios, Las Vegas, Nevada, whom Sara Russell interviewed in April 2003. Now this interview is particularly symptomatic of the current revolution sweeping poetry around the globe, because here Sara is chatting with a well-known electronic publisher, the very person who has published more than one of Sara Russell's own poetry books in CD-ROM format, delightfully entertaining titles like Spiders & Gliders and Pinky's Little Book of Shadows, both illustrated by Sara Russell's own highly original artwork. Need I say more? Not only that, Elaine Davis has also published yours truly, not just once, but twice, the first release being my own CD-ROM poetry anthology, Canadian Spirit Voices (2003), which by the way Sara has been advertising in Poetry Life & Times for the past 3 years. It would be no understatement to conclude that Elaine Davis, Sara Russell and I myself have all contributed to the flowering of multimedia poetry in the early twenty-first century.  6. Last but far from least, I would like to mention, and scarcely in passing, one of Sara's most recent interviews with one of the most famous contemporary poets living, namely Michael R. Burch (March 2006), the Editor of one of the world's foremost and most illustrious of poetry clearing houses on the Internet, viz. none other than The HyperTexts. That site features so many splendid and highly reputed contemporary poets it's enough to make one's head spin! I refer in passing to just a few of these writers, namely: Michael Burch himself, Joe Rugger of Canada, Esther Cameron of the USA, whom I myself reviewed at great length in Vallance Review 38 October 2004, Annie Finch, the famous contemporary American sonneteer and formalist poet at The University of Chicago, Leland Jamieson and Yala Korwin. I could go on, but you surely get the picture. Michael Burch, like Sara Russell, Sondra Ball, Üzeyir Lokman Çayci, C.S. Snow and myself of course, along with so many other poets Sara Russell has interviewed over the past 9 years in Poetry Life & Times all happily exemplify the spirit of our Age, an Era in which so many rapid changes are sweeping the Arts all around the world that the future holds bright promise indeed. I have barely scratched the surface in this review of Sara Russell's tenure as Editor of Poetry Life & Times for the past nine years. It is really up to us all, as readers of Poetry Life & Times, to revisit any and all past Interviews that appeal most to us personally from the many scores Sara has so skilfully penned in her wonderful E-Zine, if we are to garner a true appreciation of her remarkable talents as the Editor of a classy world-class poetry E-Zine, Poetry Life & Times, yes, a poetry journal publisher of the first order. On this resounding musical note, Sara Russell and I do humbly take our well earned leave. © by Richard Vallance, March 25 2006 with the editorial assistance of Richard Doiron and Kevin Regalbuto [1] Cf. Vallance Review 15, November 2002 [Rupert Brooke]; Vallance Review 32, April 2004 [Alan Seeger] and Vallance Review 33, May 2004 [Alan Seeger]; and Vallance Review 43, March 2005 [Edna Saint Vincent Millay] [2] Cronin, Vincent. pg. 167 in "The Venetian Republic", in The Flowering of the Renaissance. xvii, 330 pp. London: The Folio Society, © 2001 [reprinted with permission by arrangement with Vincent Cronin © 1969] [3] Percy Bysshe Shelley: Defence of Poetry (1821), excerpts, references & notes
Richard Vallance is the author of: Canadian Federation of Poets: Poetry Lessons: Lesson & Exercise - Week 18 SONNETS in The Canadian Federation of Poets weekly Poetry Progress Lessons & Exercises series
SONNETTO POESIA is published quarterly in print & is advertised on the front page of the current issue of Poetry Life and Times. To subscribe to SONNETTO POESIA, contact the editor, Richard Vallance. To read the earlier e-zine back issues, visit the sonnet journal's Home Page here: 
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