Rainy Day at 30

It’s hard to imagine a student literary magazine that began in 1969 would still be with us in 2002. In many ways, I can’t disentangle the magazine from the epoch in which it first appeared: it was the mighty Sixties, with the Vietnam War, the lust-ridden body, and the wild cornucopia of the tie-dyed, the unimpeachably true, and the irreducibly silly. I don’t know if every generation feels that the world speaks through them, but we did. Caught between the exigencies of a terrible war and the irrepressible Civil Rights movement—and the truth that most of us, whatever our protestations, were privileged—we oscillated between a knowledge of our safety (for Cornell was neither Saigon nor Selma) and our understandable, if overwrought, sense of self-contempt. About us, W.D. Snodgrass was certainly right: we were “the vaguely furiously driven.”

Appropriately titled Rainy Day to celebrate Ithaca’s glorious weather, the magazine was founded by Rich Jorgenson, a Cornell MFA student, who was a gentle, bean-thin shaman, with a devilish grin. I recall that Rich always said, “Far out,” when he liked a poem. Yet no matter what his 60s persona—and we all had our auras, in those idyllic days—he was an excellent critic. Rich didn’t believe in grades to the joy of his undergraduates, but he did believe in poetry. And his coterie of editors—Peter Fortunato, Mary Gilliland, Dan Dlugonski, and I, to name but a few—would meet, discuss, and try to publish the best material we could find.

Some of our work was editorial; some of it was crass hucksterism. Like most fledgling publications, we had to get money and we had to solicit work. Rich knew something about printing; the rest of us, in all honesty, were simply writers seeking corroboration: we wanted to write; we wanted to help other writers; beyond that, it was catch-as-catch-can.

In our first year, we published a poem by Richard Price, who is now a famous novelist and screenwriter. We also published poems by Anselm Hollo, James Bertolino, and Thomas Johnson. The editorial policy—if one can term it that—was eclectic and, at times, capricious. In the non-Cornell world, Rich was a serious cook, who loved to make various Epicurean delights, and it seemed as if Rainy Day was simply a further incarnation of his passion: we were always creating a new confection—poetic bouillabaisse. Still, we published some very good stuff and much trash. But we kept at it, issue after issue.

It’s now thirty-three years: it’s hard to believe. I would guess that Rainy Day might well be the longest-lived student publication in the country. Whatever else can be said, I can bet that today’s editors are overjoyed at that wonderful poem or story that they have miraculously saved from the unfeeling universe; that they, too, are overtired by those long editorial meetings—with those endless, though oddly delicious, arguments about what makes for a good poem or story; and that when the magazine finally appears, and it all makes sense for a precious moment, they, too, will rejoice, as we did. But then, in a few weeks, it’s time to begin again—the murky manuscripts, the heady palaver, the world which, needing an editor, shares some ineludible glimmering beyond the dark.

I’m delighted that Rainy Day is still with us—delighted and amazed.