Temblor, No. 8 (1988)

This 1988 number of Temblor is best met through the writing itself. It contains 26 named pieces or sections, beginning with Chalk by Barbara Guest, On Ron Silliman by Bruce Campbell, and Ink by Ron Silliman. That opening offers a direct path through the issue, but it is not the only one. A reader can follow the printed order, pause over a familiar contributor, or start with a title that catches the eye. No special background is needed. The magazine explains itself gradually through the choices it makes and through the company each piece keeps.

Temblor ran to ten issues between 1985 and 1989, edited by Leland Hickman in North Hollywood. This is the eighth, published in 1988: twenty-six contents entries over 178 numbered pages, opening with Barbara Guest’s Chalk and closing with Clayton Eshleman’s At the Speed of Wine. Long projects are the governing unit: eleven poems from The Pilot and the other excerpts or poem groups let serial form, accumulation, and return displace the self-contained magazine lyric. Taken together, the issue offers a cross-section of ongoing experimental practices—poetry, prose, translation, and performance sharing space without being reduced to a single school.

The contents page also works like a small map. Early entries establish the issue’s first set of voices; around the middle, The Answers and Four Strange Books, 5-9 by Tom Mandel changes the view; the closing stretch reaches At the Speed of Wine by Clayton Eshleman. The works differ in length, subject, and manner, yet their placement creates connections that a simple list of names cannot show. The pleasure comes from those changes. A short piece can clear the air after a longer one, a new voice can redirect the mood, and an unexpected title can make an earlier page look different when the reader thinks back to it.

The contributor list includes Barbara Guest, Bruce Campbell, Ron Silliman, Stephen Ratcliffe, Leslie Scalapino, Steve McCaffery, Diane Ward, and Robert Kelly, along with 16 additional contributors. Some readers will arrive looking for a particular name; others will meet these contributors here for the first time. Either approach works. The publication details add useful context: the issue was edited by Leland Hickman, published by Temblor, and issued from North Hollywood, California. A journal is also a made object, assembled by people deciding what to print, how to order it, and which voices should share a number. Reading from beginning to end lets those choices appear naturally.

The catalog subjects—Postwar American poetry, Experimental writing, Poetry in translation, and Little magazines—are useful starting points, especially for searching, but they do not set limits on what a reader may find. For a first visit, begin with Chalk by Barbara Guest, turn next to The Answers and Four Strange Books, 5-9 by Tom Mandel, and finish with At the Speed of Wine by Clayton Eshleman. The clean reading edition is designed for that kind of movement. Original scan: 93 PDF pages. Reader’s edition: 262 PDF pages. It keeps the contents in a stable, legible form and makes names and titles easier to find. A source facsimile remains part of the project’s private editorial record, but it is not included in the public upload. What appears here is the reading copy: a practical way to spend time with the issue and discover which pieces invite a return.